Most commonly used chinese characters

joannah
 September 30, 2008, 09:35 AM posted in General Discussion

I came across a list of the 1000 most used Chinese characters, ranked from most used down. Thought this might be useful for anyone wanting to focus on the characters they are going to get most use out of.

http://www.wearyourchinesename.com/1000-most-commonly-used-chinese-characters.html

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henning
 September 30, 2008, 09:37 AM

And if you want to continue from there:

http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/list.php?Which=MO

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changye
 September 30, 2008, 11:02 AM

Hi joannah and henning,

Thank you for the “discouraging” character lists, hehe. Looks like that there are still great number of Chinese characters waiting for us to learn them. By the way, in the era of the former Han dynasty (西汉, 206 – 8 B.C.), people were required to be able to read and write at least 9,000 Chinese characters (隶书) to become clerical officers at a local government, and plus sufficient knowledge about eight character styles (秦书八体) to be employed by the imperial palace. Would you like to apply for the job?

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joannah
 September 30, 2008, 12:19 PM

In a way it is actually kinda encouraging that only 152 characters make up 50% of writing. Given i know quite a few already its well within reach to understand half of what i read.

 

I certainly wouldn't have wanted to go through the application process for a civil service job in ancient china. I studied the civil service examination process last semester and was amazed at how hard they made it. The amount of stuff people had to know in fine detail was incredible.

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changye
 September 30, 2008, 12:29 PM

You might be right. We should take a glass-half-full approach to learning Chinese!