I'm learning Japanese at the moment and I find it really annoying that there are multiple pronunciations for each kanji. It made me curious, do characters in any single Chinese dialect use multiple pronunciations for characters? Or are they all the same throughout the dialect? Also another question, how many characters do you need to learn (equivalent to jouyou), and what percentage of the jouyou kanji are used in whatever the Chinese equivalent of the jouyou is? I know some are simplified and some are unique to only Japanese. I hope this won't get deleted because I'm not actually learning Chinese, but I am certainly interested in it.
2012-12-22, 12:46 pm
Hi egoplant,
Regarding the number of characters if we use Heisig's books as an estimate, RTK1 is roughly 2000 characters. Whereas RTH and RSH (Traditional / Simplified) comes in two volumes each of 1500 characters so I think for everyday Chinese you'll need roughly 3000 characters.
Wikipedia [url=]seems to confirm this[/url]:
A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 5,000–7,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy.
Regarding the number of characters if we use Heisig's books as an estimate, RTK1 is roughly 2000 characters. Whereas RTH and RSH (Traditional / Simplified) comes in two volumes each of 1500 characters so I think for everyday Chinese you'll need roughly 3000 characters.
Wikipedia [url=]seems to confirm this[/url]:
A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 5,000–7,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy.
2012-12-22, 1:06 pm
Thanks for responding. Any idea about the amount of crossover? Like if I knew all the jouyou kanji, what percentage of those would fall into the useful Chinese group? And also about pronunciations, are there multiple or just 1 each? If there are multiple, would you say there are more or less then Japanese?
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2012-12-22, 1:25 pm
The crossover has been discussed before. Look into the "Resources for Studying" sub forum.
Spreadsheet with RSH + RTH + RTK!
It looks like there is a very large crossover yes. The number of Japanese only characters is only a fraction. That's true for Traditional Chinese though. I think for Simplified Chinese there are many simplified variants. However if you already studied Japanese characters (which are closer to traditional hanzi) there is a sort of logic to it.
Spreadsheet with RSH + RTH + RTK!
It looks like there is a very large crossover yes. The number of Japanese only characters is only a fraction. That's true for Traditional Chinese though. I think for Simplified Chinese there are many simplified variants. However if you already studied Japanese characters (which are closer to traditional hanzi) there is a sort of logic to it.