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I am talking about literacy. For reading Chinese newspaper headlines you probably need around 50,000 basic character recognition.
by teleforce 2y ago
I am talking about literacy. For reading Chinese newspaper headlines you probably need around 50,000 basic character recognition.
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoYou’re off by a factor of 20+.
- throwthrowee 2y agoMy understanding is that the average Chinese dictionary has 20,000 characters. The full set is somewhere around 50,000. The average educated adult knows about 8000. The number of characters to read a Chinese newspaper is about 2500 to 3500. This is based on multiple sources online. Here is one example source (BBC): https://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese/mini_guides/characters/characters_howmany.shtml https://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese/mini_gu...
- teleforce 2y agoRegardless the number of characters required for understanding the headlines, I think my points are still valid. After several thousands years of using Chinese characters Korean found that it's not intuitive for literacy hence they invented their very own alphabet namely Hangul, and voila the literacy increased considerably. Fun facts, as a foreigner, you can learn to read Hangul in one single day, and then you can read the Korean written words for names, sign boards, etc but to understand them you need to learn the Korean language. However, if your mother tongue is Korean, you can understand them intuitively. That's the reason I considered alphabet is more important than invention of the wheels and it's truly the original "bicycle of the mind".