Before I came to China, and for probably the first 2-3 months while in China, I had convinced myself I didn’t need to learn characters. It seemed like oral proficiency would be good enough to conduct business in China. Then I started to think… if I can’t even write or read an email in Chinese, aren’t I pretty much useless?
As time continued in China, I realized (though, it shouldn’t have been all that much of a suprise) how ubiquitous Chinese characters are. On billboards, street signs, advertisenments, TV sub-titles, restaurant menus, and so on. Pinyin, while used to input characters on the computer or cell phones, is NOT a form of writing used by Chinese. Knowing pinyin will not help you because it is generally not used at all in writing.
Before I left for China, one of my friends told me, “I don’t think you’ll be able to learn the characters. I think you need to be born there for that.” Popular opinion seems to believe Chinese characters are incredibly difficult, or just simply impossible, to study. All those squiggly lines, what the heck do those mean? Chinese characters are not easy, but I do not think they are nearly as difficult as people think. Moreover, learning Chinese characters is enjoyable. For me, it’s been one of the most best parts of learning Chinese. And this might shock you, but for me, it is actually easier to use Chinese characters than it is to speak Mandarin. Try to be understood in Mandarin and you may know what I am talking about.
Just to give you a brief overview, there are about 3,500 characters used in modern day literature. Of course, there are loads more characters, some 80,000, but have all been antiquated. This is good news for non-natives studying Chinese characters. You’ll only be required to master 3,500 characters to be completely literate in Chinese.
You will usually see “most common character lists” that rank the top 3,500 characters. Naturally this is a good idea to pay attention to these lists so you study the most common ones first. Did you know just mastering the first 50 characters alone will yield a roughly 30% literacy rate? Learn more about Chinese characters here, and how to demystify them as exotic scribbles into meaningful pieces of language.
