I would agree that we don’t have to know 4000 characters equally well, but the rarer ones do pop up more often than we think. I had a look at a frequency list of Hanzi (http://tinyurl.com/2bz83gy), separated into 2500 common and 1000 less common ones (http://preview.tinyurl.com/2a3xweu). These lists are never 100% accurate but they provide some guidance. I am far from knowing the majority of the less common ones (the second link) if see them isolated without context, but just from sampling them I have to confess that many of them do occur in normal contexts.
@Steve,
since you claim to know 4000 characters, do you really instantly know most of these characters in the less-common-list (the second link)? How did you count the amount of characters you know?
I do not know how I came up with the 4,000 characters. It was 42 years ago that I finished my studies. It is easier to recognize characters in context for sure.
So would you say today you still know 4000 characters? I am not asking to attack you or anything, I am really interested because as you know I am working vey hard myself at mastering Chinese.
Knowing a character is of course somewhat fuzzy concept but from sampling hanzi frequency lists I would assume that my “knowledge” is closer to 2000 hanzi or so. Almost everything I read I do in front of a computer so I can use dictionaries. Reading a physical book I don’t think I would enjoy too much due to the hanzi I do not know or do not remember.
Again, I don’t want to pick a fight (we are not discussing politics here), but based on my own experience I find 4000 to be a remarkable achievement and almost a bit difficult to believe. But maybe you have good advice that I havn’t come across yet on how to speed up character acquisition. I guess handwriting skills help a lot but I really don’t have time to delve into that.