How many Chinese characters do you need? We measured it

How many Chinese characters are there?

Unicode, the standard that puts text on every screen, now encodes 101,997 Chinese characters. We counted them in its newest release.

The big dictionaries are almost as large. The biggest printed one, the Zhonghua Zihai, lists more than 85,000.

Most of these are old forms, variant spellings of the same character, or one-off names of people and places. They're kept so old books and records can be typed, not because anyone reads them every day.

Unicode also counts Simplified and Traditional forms as separate characters. Study, 学(xué), and its Traditional form, 學(xué), count twice. Our guide to Simplified and Traditional Chinese explains the two scripts.

Here's how those totals compare with the characters people actually use:

Sources: our count of the Unicode 18.0 Unihan database; dictionaries via Wikipedia; Jun Da's Modern Chinese list; China's 2013 list, 2022 curriculum and literacy rule, linked below.

Even 193 million characters of modern writing use fewer than 10,000 different characters. That's the pool you're really drawing from, and you only need the top of it.

A thousand characters do most of the work

Characters are used very unevenly. A small core turns up constantly, and most of the rest almost never do.

You can see it in film and TV subtitles. The single most common character, I, 我(wǒ), is about one character in every 23 that people say on screen.

Here's how much of the news, and of film and TV subtitles, the most common characters cover:

Sources: our counts over 5.1 million characters of Chinese Wikinews and the SUBTLEX-CH subtitle corpus. How we counted.

Notice how quickly the bars flatten. Past about 2,000 characters, each new one turns up so rarely that you'll learn it best by meeting it in real reading.

Percentages also hide how reading feels. Here's what each level means on the page:

• 90%: one character in 10 is new. That's study, not reading.
• 95%: one in 20. You can read with a dictionary close by.
• 98%: one in 50. You can usually guess the rest from context.

Reading research puts the comfort line for words at about 98%, as our guide to learning through stories explains. Characters aren't words, so here the lines only tell you how often you'd have to stop.

See what your number feels like

Pick how many characters you know, or your HSK level, and what you want to read. The calculator shows how much of that kind of text you'd recognise. It also masks the characters you wouldn't know yet in a real example:

Each blank box is a character you'd have to look up. Switch to your HSK level, too: some characters never turn up on any HSK list, like the second character of Sydney, 悉尼(Xīní), so they stay blank at every level.

Then try the menu at 2,000 characters. It's the one goal that stays hard long after the news gets easy.

Every goal needs a different number

How many characters you need depends on what you want to read. We counted six kinds of text, from street signs to novels.

Here's how many characters each goal takes, if you learn them in everyday order:

Sources: our counts; the six collections are described in How we counted.

What drives each number:

• TV and film need the fewest, because everyday talk keeps repeating the same characters.
• Graded stories stay close to that, since they're written for learners.
• News is full of names and places, like bay, 湾(wān), in Taiwan, 台湾(Táiwān).
• Signs use a few characters you rarely see elsewhere. Don't, 勿(wù), is on signs everywhere: please don't smoke, 请勿吸烟(qǐng wù xīyān).
• Novels reach for rarer, more vivid characters, and for their heroes' names.
• Menus are packed with ingredients and cooking methods that everyday talk barely uses.

If you have one goal, aim at its number, not at a general target.

Menus and signs reward a short list

For menus and signs, learning the right few hundred characters beats learning thousands in the usual order.

Menus show this best. In everyday order, even 2,000 characters leave you knowing under three-quarters of what's on a menu. The gaps are the food itself: shrimp, 虾(xiā); duck, 鸭(yā); pepper, 椒(jiāo); steam, 蒸(zhēng); crab, 蟹(xiè).

The single biggest gap is stir-fry, 炒(chǎo). It's the most common menu character that everyday order leaves until after the first thousand.

So we tested the shortcut. We built a list from half the dishes in Beijing's menu guide and checked it against the other half. Here's what a list made for the goal saves you:

Source: our counts; median of 200 random half-and-half splits. How we counted.

If you're travelling soon, a few hundred menu characters will do more for you than another thousand from a general list.

What each HSK level lets you read

HSK 6's reading list gets you to about 95% of the characters in the news.

The new HSK has two character lists, one to recognise and a shorter one to write. Our guide to HSK 3.0's two character lists explains both. Many pages still quote the old exam's HSK 6 figure of about 2,600 characters. The new reading list for levels 1 to 6 has 1,940.

Here's how much of the news, and of novels, each level's reading list covers:

Sources: the new HSK syllabus; our counts over Chinese Wikinews and the five novels.

Below HSK 4, native text is study, not reading, and graded readers fill the gap. Our HSK word lists show every character and word, level by level.

Chinese children learn about 3,500 characters

China expects its pupils to recognise about 3,500 characters by the end of ninth grade. They learn to write fewer.

Here's the timeline in the 2022 national curriculum:

Source: China's Ministry of Education, Chinese curriculum standard for compulsory education, 2022 edition. Each figure is "about"; the standard gives no writing target for grades 7 to 9.

So a Chinese second-grader is expected to recognise about as many characters as the HSK 5 list. The new exam's top band, HSK 7–9, lands between the grade 6 and grade 9 targets. That's a useful reality check on your own progress.

The legal bar for adult literacy is lower. A State Council rule on literacy, first published in 1988, counts town residents as literate at 2,000 characters, and farmers at 1,500.

You'll often read that educated Chinese adults know 8,000 characters. We couldn't find a study behind that number, so we don't repeat it as fact.

Knowing the characters isn't knowing the words

Characters are the building blocks, but you read in words. Three in four words on the HSK 1–6 lists are two characters long, and the pair often means something neither half suggests.

Take east, 东(dōng), and west, 西(xī). Put them together and you get thing, 东西(dōngxi).

We checked how big this gap is in the news. With HSK 6's characters, you'd know about 95% of the characters. But only about 62% of the words are on the HSK 1–6 word list.

Almost a third of the words in our news count were made entirely of characters on that list, yet weren't words on it. Those are the words you can sound out but not understand.

So count characters to track your progress, but learn them inside words, and read a lot. Our guide on how to read Chinese shows how.

A plan for learning your characters

You don't need a target of 3,000 before you start reading. You need the right next few hundred, met many times.

1. Pick one goal. Use the calculator to find the number that gets you to 95% of it.
2. Learn characters inside words. Learn 东西(dōngxi), thing, as a word, not 东(dōng) and 西(xī) as trivia.
3. Read a lot of easy text. Graded stories bring the same characters back again and again, which is how they stick.
4. Review on a schedule. Flashcards with spaced repetition show you each character again just before you'd forget it.
5. Write less than you read. By HSK 6, the new exam asks you to recognise 1,940 characters but write only 700.

Read with pinyin on every character. SayMei's graded stories have pinyin, audio and an English line for every sentence, and chapter 1 of every book is free. Open the stories

What to do next

• Check your number. Try the calculator above with the goal you care about most.
• Make your goal's short list. For menus or signs, learn the characters that goal uses most, first.
• Read something easy today. One short graded story beats an hour of character lists.
• Learn words, not just characters. Every character you learn should arrive inside a word you can use.

If you want to practise writing too, print character practice sheets for the characters you're learning.