Understand Chinese

When you decided to learn to understand Chinese, you may have wondered "How many Chinese words do I need to know to understand Chinese?" or "What Chinese words do I need to know to understand Chinese?"

"All" is NOT the right answer.

If you don't know which words or characters are most frequently used, you may spend your time and energy with less important words or characters - maybe a big number of them!

In all languages, a few words are used far more often than all the other words. That is true also for Chinese language.

It has been scientifically demonstrated by universities, scolars and government-sponsored or indipendent institutions that only a relatively few number of words and characters make up a big percentage of all spoken and written Chinese language.

What did they do to demonstrate it?

First, they collected huge quantities of material in Chinese language, including websites, books, fictions scripts, news articles, newsletters, magazines, etc., covering subject fields such as informative computer science, economics, education, government, health, history, law, military, news, philosophy, politics, popular science, religion, imaginative general fiction, children, detective, drama, history, Kongfu or martial arts, military, prose, literary review and science fiction.

Second, all texts were digitized and made ready to be processed by special computer software.

Third, they segmented, identified and counted each different character, word and/or bigram.

Fourth, they compiled a character and word frequency list, the one you find at the website www.wearyourchinesename.com.

How can it all help you?

Now you can know exactly what Chinese words and characters are the most used and start learning to understand Chinese from them!

That is great information. Just think of how big is the total number of Chinese characters: 50,000! Well, if you learn only 152 selected characters, those most used, you would already know 50% of all Chinese language usage!

The Chinese Lessons you get from WearYourChineseName.com let you learn smart by focusing on the most frequently used words and characters.

For example, consider the following Chinese text (the characters belonging to the list of 1,000 most commonly used Chinese characters are highlighted in yellow -
for the list of the most frequently used Chinese characters click here):

当然，世界各地的卫生标准都不一样，人在不同的环境长大，对洁净会养成不同的观念。以往在许多国家里，学校的环境清洁整齐，有助学生养成良好的卫生习惯。今天，有些学校的操场，充斥着垃圾和废物的碎片，看上去好像是个垃圾堆而不是给学生休息、嬉戏的地方。教室又怎样？达朗是澳大利亚一所中学的管理员，他说：“现在甚至在教室里，垃圾也随处可见。”有些学生认为，老师吩咐他们“拾起垃圾”或“收拾整齐”，就等于处罚他们。事实上，有些老师的确会用这种方式惩罚学生。

The text above is composed by a total of 192 characters. 161 of them (83%), highlighted in yellow, belong to the list of 1,000 most commonly used Chinese characters -
for the list of the most frequently used Chinese characters click here.

English translation:

Of course, standards of cleanliness are not the same around the world, and people grow up with varying concepts of cleanliness. In times past, a clean, well-ordered school environment in many countries helped students develop good habits of cleanliness. Today, some school grounds are so full of litter and debris that they resemble a garbage dump more than a place to play or exercise. And what about the classroom? Darren, a janitor in an Australian high school, observed: "Now we see filth in the classroom as well." Some students take the instruction "Pick it up" or "Clean it up" to mean that they are being punished. The problem is that some teachers do use cleaning as a means of punishment.

List of different Chinese characters contained in the text above:

当然世界各地的卫生标准都不一样人在同环境长大对洁净会养成观念以往许多国家里学校清整齐有助良好习惯今天些操场充斥着垃圾和废物碎片看上去像是个堆而给休息嬉戏方教室又怎达朗澳利亚所中管理员他说现甚至也随处可见认为老师吩咐们拾起或收就等于罚事实确用这种式惩

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