5 ms·

Yes, learning all the characters has a steep learning curve, but once one passes that stage, ... One never passes that stage, though? Even once you know t

Yes, learning all the characters has a steep learning curve, but once one passes that stage, ... One never passes that stage, though? Even once you know the 6,000 characters that people often cite as being needed to read a novel, you'll still run into characters that you don't know (especially in proper names, but also in less common, especially literary or chengyu, vocabulary). I also disagree about the "grammatical similarity", but at the point of fluency we're talking about here (day-to-day fluency in idiomatic Chinese), that doesn't matter anyway, not even a bit.

g9yuayon 2y ago
An elementary student in China probably won't learn more than 3000 characters, yet they can read advanced novels. I suspect the difference is that a native speaker feels more comfortable skipping or guess unknown words. I certainly felt more discomfort when encountering new words when reading even a popular fiction in English, while having no problem guessing the meaning of a new word in my native language.