Timeline for Multiple characters for the same sound in Chinese
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 15, 2018 at 8:35 | comment | added | Pikachu620 | Kevin Fang is right. I was born and raised in Taiwan, despite the 12 years in my 30s when I live in America, I can say I can't be any more Chinese! But I only know NOT EVEN 10% of the words out there! (Which just correspond to the ratio Kevin given). AND I HAVE A MASTER DEGREE!!! Most of the words you listed from the wiktionary are probably only know by Chinese Literature professors! And I dare say that quite a big portion of it even THEM had never heard of! So please don't fret too much over it! Just learn what you can and you'll be fine! Good luck!!! | |
| Aug 15, 2018 at 4:46 | comment | added | Kevin. Fang | Besides, 70-80% is my approximation in your given examples. The biggest dictionary has over 80000 characters while high school graduates are only required to master 6600 of them. | |
| Aug 15, 2018 at 4:43 | comment | added | Kevin. Fang | Most of them are used in ancient articles, people's names (a lot of Chinese people name their children from old books), species' names, chemical elements, special phrases such as 成语. Basically, you can communicate with native Chinese people without any problem if you know around 3000-4000 characters in total. | |
| Aug 15, 2018 at 4:20 | comment | added | Tomsofty33 | If what you mean is that 70% to 80% are not used AT ALL, then why are they still listed there? | |
| Aug 15, 2018 at 1:12 | comment | added | Kevin. Fang | So most modern Chinese 'words' are made of 2 'characters' or more. This reduces the numbers of same sound words significantly. | |
| Aug 15, 2018 at 1:11 | comment | added | Kevin. Fang | From what I know, about 70% to 80% percent of the characters you listed are not used in common language. And to make my words clear, I'm talking about less homophones in 'words'. | |
| Aug 15, 2018 at 0:47 | comment | added | Tomsofty33 | Is this really something not that much to you or am I just missing something here? Or is the chinese language just has the tendency of using the exact same sound again and again to use it for different meanings? | |
| Aug 15, 2018 at 0:46 | comment | added | Tomsofty33 | For the sound "gé" there exist 58 different characters en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gé | |
| Aug 15, 2018 at 0:44 | comment | added | Tomsofty33 | For the sound "bó" alone there exist 98 different characters en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bó | |
| Aug 15, 2018 at 0:43 | comment | added | Tomsofty33 | For the sound "ruì" there are 16 different characters en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ruì | |
| Aug 14, 2018 at 23:58 | history | answered | Kevin. Fang | CC BY-SA 4.0 |