How many unique glyphs do you need to know to learn Chinese?

Question

Glyphs is probably not the right term. I'll try to explain what I mean.

I often read things like: "Chinese is much harder than English: there are 50,000 characters but only 26 letters". This is not really a valid comparison because around 45,000 of those characters are archaic, variants, or really unusual characters that you probably will never encounter. But still, that leaves maybe 5000 or so characters that you need to learn vs. 26.

Let's say 2000 characters is enough for daily life, 2000 characters vs. 26 letters still seems overwhelming.

In fact it's not necessary to 2000 unique glyphs. A Chinese person doesn't need to memorise 选 stroke by stroke, it's enough to know 走之旁 and 先 to put them together to make 选. Just as in English you can spell the word Cup using 3 unique component glyphs C, U and P.

To have an apples-with-apples comparison of the effort in becoming literate in Chinese vs. English, you would need to compare the number of unique component glyphs in Chinese with the 26 alphabetic characters. That number would certainly be higher, but I'm thinking it would be low hundreds rather than thousands. You would also need to consider that a lot of English spelling works at the level of word roots and affixes, and you have things such as the -ight in light and right, which more or less need to be learned as a unit. At school I did a lot of 死记硬背 learning to read, and I'm not sure that it was actually any less than if it had been Chinese I was learning.

So, my question is: how many unique components are needed to be able to be able to form all or most of the Chinese characters in use today? By unique components, I mean parts of characters that can't be further divided into simpler characters and can only be described in terms of strokes.

Also, what is the proper term to use？I'm assuming it's not 部首, as it would have to include phonetic and other components, but 部首 would be a subset.

Answer 1

Well, average literate adult knows approximately 8-10,000 characters, many of them in that caregory of rarely used//outdated from school studies of old texts etc.

Only counting high school education level is probably around 4-5,000 characters. You can easily get by in daily life with less than 3,000 no problem. Thats usually the level second language learners aim for.

Please understand that by the nature of this question you can't really give an exact answer, since literacy varies wildly simply by if someone has a reading related career or hobby etc. But hope it helps you get a basic idea. Also not that for most purposes, measuring character knowledge isn't nearly as valuable as knowing actual vocabulary. Most adults are gonna know around 10-30,000 vocabulary, just like in english or probably any other language （＾ν＾）

Answer 2

214 radicals are required to use dictionary for learning.

Traditional Chinese groups all characters according to 214 radicals (simplified uses 189), which are organized based on number of strokes into a chart called the bushou(部首).

Added after user comments:

Chinese characters by parts/components(部件)

"Sometimes when you are trying to find the meaning of a Chinese character it is not possible to use the traditional method. Instead of listing characters by radical this index lists characters by component part. In many cases the radical is the component to look up but sometimes the radical is hard to recognize or locate within the character . If a character has multiple identifiable components it is listed under each of the component part. Take for example the character 狗 ‘dog’ it has the ‘dog’ radical 犭 ‘quan’ and so it is listed under this component, but it also has elements ‘mouth’ 口 and ‘wrap’ 勹 so it is also listed under these as well. For a beginner the ‘mouth’ is the clearest component to look up by rather than the ‘dog’ radical. Some characters are considered ‘atomic’ - they can not be split into simpler parts and so do not appear in this list, for example 五 ‘5’."

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_components