As for how many new characters you need to learn, that depends on how many you know now; Heisig's RTH1&2 books go up to 3035, but depending on what you're reading you're probably going to need much more than that. Besides, you need to learn the readings and uncover the 'real meaning' for the character when used in the context of what you're reading, and that's where the fun begins.

toshiromiballza wrote:

Why would anyone need a deck with over 70,000 characters? Unless I'm missing something...

You don't need them all if you're studying Modern Chinese — it's 21,000 character tops in that case, counting both Simplified and Traditional variants. The thing about having all the characters in the deck is that:

1. For the currently used characters, it has many associations already in place (simplified/traditional variants, readings in Mandarin from three dictionaries, readings in Cantonese, Korean, Japanese [romanized], Vietnamese and the Tang dynasty, Cangjie and Four-corner codes, plus the audio for most of the syllables with tones, among other things), so those who are interested in any of that information for their review sessions, especially if they want multiple points related to a character combined into a single note, don't have to add it all again by themselves;

2. It's very easy to append any kind of information from an external list, it only requires that you have the Unicode value for the character, which many conversion tools give. For example, I've added three different frequency orders from different Chinese lists (simplified/fiction, simplified/non-fiction, and traditional/Usenet).

As for the characters that are only listed in there and don't have much information besides their mere existence, usually rarer ones whose definitions are extremely hard to find even in the best of dictionaries, the usefulness depends; in the worst of cases, it's good to have an index with all of them ready for, I don't know, being admired — they're nice to look at once in a while.

gdaxeman wrote:

You don't need them all if you're studying Modern Chinese — it's 21,000 character tops in that case, counting both Simplified and Traditional variants.

I don't study Chinese, but I'm pretty sure that is way too many, and by counting both traditional and simplified, you'd need to know around 6000-7000 tops. The other ones are probably so rare, most Chinese don't even know them, and aren't very useful in modern every-day Chinese at all.

toshiromiballza wrote:

I don't study Chinese, but I'm pretty sure that is way too many, and by counting both traditional and simplified, you'd need to know around 6000-7000 tops. The other ones are probably so rare, most Chinese don't even know them, and aren't very useful in modern every-day Chinese at all.

I would say that after the 4,000 mark for a single set they get extremely area/situation-specific, but they really are used in Modern Chinese; for example, I've added some to my deck that are ordered above the 8,000th in those frequency lists I mentioned (and some don't even have a frequency number), characters coming from my readings of materials for native speakers — mainly blogs and websites for now, such as those I link to in the RevTH Wiki, and I guess reading certain types of books for highly educated native speakers would include even more "rare" characters. Of course, such frequency lists vary a lot depending on what's included in the corpus, but that's exactly why the ceiling for all characters used in Modern Chinese is high — different areas of knowledge can use different characters to refer to different terms and such, and they often do. These characters don't appear all the time but, when they do, it's one more character that can be learned, by any means (even by "just remembering it".)

Certainly most Chinese people don't dive deeply into all the possible areas of knowledge or read all the things that exist, like any other people, so they don't know most of these less common characters and only learn those that they bump into occasionally, but it doesn't mean these characters aren't "important" just because a person from another area will never need to know it. The number is high because the interests of people are vast, and Chinese is a character-only language heavily geared toward bigrams and single-characters, so depending on the occasion simply mixing characters that are used somewhere else doesn't work.

So, in the end, my tops could be better explained a collective tops ("you all who would like to study Modern Chinese", considering a lot of people with vastly different interests and who read different things), not for a single person. Certainly a single person could learn that much and even more, not because they need them all active in their minds all the time but because they want to simply learn them; maybe they want to be a walking 字典 [character dictionary] of sorts.

Last edited by gdaxeman (2012 October 24, 2:46 am)

gdaxeman wrote:

Certainly a single person could learn that much and even more, not because they need them all active in their minds all the time but because they want to simply learn them; maybe they want to be a walking 字典 [character dictionary] of sorts.

21,000 or more? I doubt that, unless we're talking about somebody "special" like Rain Man.