But According to Ling Q’s Progress Snapshot,
0～2500 No Knowledge
2500～5000 elementary 1
5001～10000 elementary 2
10001～15000 Intermediate1
15001～20000 Intermediate1
20001～25000 Advanced 1
25001～ Advanced 2
In conclusion, I think we should change Ling Q’s Progress Snapshot in Chinese. Personally, I cannot reach elementary 2 in Chinese because of lack of vocabulary even if I pass a Intermediate level test. It is totally strange, this Progress Snapshot.
Known Words 4038
LingQs Created 7838
LingQs Learned 2061
Hours of Listening Add 332.5
Words of Reading Add 355082
Words of Writing Add 8699
Hours of Speaking Add 304.9
It is hard for me to obtain 5000 words in LingQ although I study many textbooks.
I do not think we count the same way. I presume that the HSK measures 汉字 （individual characters） and ours measures words 复合词。It may still be that we should change our levels. Let’s hear from others on this. Thanks for bringing it up.
I agree with you there, and not just for chinese. Different languages mean you have different sizes of active vocabulary. I mean, you don’t need many words to be accepted as fluent in Spanish whereas something like English, you do. (I don’t mean that in an offensive way)
I think this is a difficult issue and one that I cannot answer. I am not even sure how our system counts. However, I know about 4,000 Chinese characters. These characters appear in many different compound words. 4,000 characters must correspond to over 20,000 compound words. I consider myself as an Advanced 1.
steve, it’s hard to tell (don’t take that as a no). I can keep a small conversation going with my Spanish teacher and can read novels, following the storyline and from the few words I don’t know, I guess from context and when I look them up, I get them right, which is why I am concentrating less on spanish now. Also, when I first started learning, I found a chart on this website:How many words do I need to learn?. According to LingQ, I have 4000 words in my vocabulary, which on that chart says around 83% of occurences. I’d say that’s about right. The rest I can get from context. My grammar is terrible though but many native speakers can speak fluently but with terrible grammar.
With regards to what I base my views on, it’s various resources. For example, looking on your wall now, you say your fluent in chinese, but that’s just 1500 words. Russian you have 60,000 words, Spanish 9,000 and French 4,000. I don’t know if they are different because of varying times you spent on them or what.
One thing that can go against what I said though is that it could just rely on how much natives want to help with foreigners.
gizmo, the main issue, I think, is how much words change their form in different languages. That accounts for most of the differences. Russian words change their form a lot. Spanish words change their form more than English words (verbs). My own stats mostly reflect the fact that my Russian vocab was learned mostly on LingQ which is not the case with my other languages.
Chinese words are not inflected, so we should really look at our levels there, and in other languages too. I would appreciate any comments on this subject here.
I think 4,000 characters (including old characters we don’t use in every day life) are too many for advanced learners, about 2000 characters are enough to guess other characters in newspapers and books so on.
Hi Steve, I see what you mean. In case you are interested, the CEF framework says that for C1 french, you need around 3500 words in your active vocabulary and for C2 (mastery), you need around 5000. Should I trust this then or just keep trying to learn until around the 10,000 mark or above? What are your views on vocab size or would you just go with LingQs?
gizmo, we do not measure active vocabulary. We only measure passive vocabulary. We also count each form of the word as a separate word, which is probably not the case with the CEF, altho I don’t know.
You will know when you are fluent. I am sure you will need to be well over the 10,000 mark to operate in a university environment. Go to the Friends section and check the rankings in French for LingQs created. Dilemme is over 13,000 and a number of others are over 8,000. This is the words LingQed. IOn my case, in Russian, but known words total is more than twice as large as the number of LingQs.
I would not pay too much attention to the Lingq rating system. Just find the appropriate material for you and work on that. I am sure you will have a good sense of your progress without measuring your vocabulary the way lingq does it. Chinese presents the learner with unique challenges on many levels. The fuzziness and ambiguity of the Chinese language are difficult to get a handle on. I do think though that 4000 characters are required to comfortably read a variety of newspapers and magazines. I also find the Chinese language extremely rich in vocabulary, so it takes a while to build that up.
I do think though that 4000 characters are required to comfortably read a variety of newspapers and magazines.
I don’t think so. 4000 characters are too many. You know, in Japanese, the following article says that 1,945 Chinese characters are enough to read newspapers and books so on.
The jōyō kanji (常用漢字, literally regular use Chinese characters?) is the guide to kanji characters announced officially by the Japanese Ministry of Education. Current jōyō kanji are those on a list of 1,945 characters issued on October 10, 1981. It is a slightly modified version of the tōyō kanji, which was the initial list of secondary school-level kanji standardized after World War II.
The 1,945 kanji in the jōyō kanji consist of:
* 1,006 kanji taught in primary school (these are known as the kyōiku kanji)
* 939 more kanji taught in secondary school
And the following article says that in chinese 5000 words (not 5000 characters) are enough to all kinds of reading materials in a daily life.
Friedemann DE
I do think though that 4000 characters are required to comfortably read a variety of newspapers and magazines.
I don’t think so. 4000 characters including ancient characters are too many to learn. You know, in Japanese, the following article says that 1,945 Chinese characters are enough to read newspapers and books so on.
The jōyō kanji (常用漢字, literally regular use Chinese characters?) is the guide to kanji characters announced officially by the Japanese Ministry of Education. Current jōyō kanji are those on a list of 1,945 characters issued on October 10, 1981. It is a slightly modified version of the tōyō kanji, which was the initial list of secondary school-level kanji standardized after World War II.
The 1,945 kanji in the jōyō kanji consist of:
1,006 kanji taught in primary school (these are known as the kyōiku kanji)
939 more kanji taught in secondary school
And the following article says that in Chinese 5000 words (not 5000 characters) are enough to all kinds of reading materials in a daily life. http://www.confuciusbcit.com/hsk_intro.asp
I have a Chinese character list book including about 2000 for advanced level of HSK, too.
In conclusion, knowing 4000 characters is not absolutely necessary.
It is usually said that about 2,000 characters are needed for basic literacy in Chinese (for example, to read a Chinese newspaper),[citation needed] and a well-educated person will know well in excess of 4,000 to 5,000 characters.
I believe, after having leaned basic 2000 characters we can guess the other 2000 characters, which we rarely see in the modern newspapers, novels, and others.