You’re probably thinking Chinese characters are impossible to learn. You’re probably wondering how anyone could possibly make meaning from them.
First, it helps to understand some background information about Chinese characters. Remember that there are about 3,500 in total needed for modern day fluency. But knowing even 2000-2,500 will get you really far, and very functional in reading Chinese. The reason for this is because the rate at which characters appear in everyday literature is a function that increases at a decreasing rate. The most common character alone, 的，yields an almost 3% literacy rate, meaning it is used 3% of the time in the literature you will read. You can bet that the 3,500th most popular character is used less…much less.
Below is a graph that shows the number of characters and the corresponding literacy rate. For me as a non-native Chinese, this chart looks rather promising. It shows that knowing only the first 500 character means you can understand 75% of written Chinese language. That’s pretty cool!
On the left is the number of characters you need to know in order to reach the corresponding literacy rate on the right.
Of course, all these literacy rates don’t necessarily make characters any easier to learn. That’s why it helps to understand where they came from. Chinese characters are the oldest form of writing still in use today. The first characters were written on the Oracle Bone, and were mostly simple pictures of what the word was intended to be. Today, most characters are actually phono-semantic compounds, which is just a fancy term that means a character has two parts: one that gives the meaning, and one that gives a sound.
Notice the characters 黑 hei，热 re. Do you see the 4 strokes at the bottom of each character? This is the “fire” radical, and it is meant to indicate that the character has something to do with fire. The first character, 黑， means black, or the color of something after it is burned over fire. The character 热，means hot, or how something feels when put over fire. You can see that the fire radical has indicated that both these characters have something to do with being hot.
The fire radical is one of 214 radicals. Knowing the radicals will help you not only understand meaning, but also distinguish the characters that differ by one one radical (there are a lot). See here just how similar Chinese characters can be, and what you can do to help distinguish them.
Tom, I know what you’re aiming to do here – I did the same when I started studying. But calling it “literacy” is slightly misleading. For example, you might know four words: ni, hao, ming, tian. But if you don’t know that nihao is hello, and that mingtian is tomorrow, then knowing the individual characters doesn’t make you literate in their usage.
When I was using the Heisig method, I highlighted pages of text based only on the characters which were 1-500, and I wrote about it here. As you can see, even knowing lots of the page really doesn’t help understand the meaning.
But one step at a time. First … learn the characters. :-)