Chinese Characters or Words?
Which comes first?
When you learn Chinese, bear in mind the difference between the Chinese characters and words.
Chinese words are made up of characters. There are some words that consist of only one character, many others consist of two or more.
So Chinese words are made up of characters, but not equivalent to characters.
Most learners learn Chinese characters diligently, but never question the difference between characters and words. Little do they know that the order of learning, i.e. which comes first in terms of learning, would affect the size of their vocabulary in the long run.
This has to do with the word frequency of Chinese.
Although there are many Chinese words being used, they are built on a rather limited number of characters. For example, the Mandarin character 天 can be used in combination with other characters to form words, such as 今天，明天，天天，白天，天亮, etc.
This explains why you need to learn only 3000 characters to read the popular Chinese text, like a newspaper.
Learn the Characters, then the Words
If your attention is on the words, it is very satisfying, because you keep adding new words to your vocabulary.
This, however, is not as effective as paying attention to the characters.
Since words are made up of characters, the frequency of you seeing a character you learn is far higher than the words you learn. For example, you would see the character 天 far more frequently than its combination with the character 亮, i.e. 天亮.
Learning the characters may be less satisfying at the beginning as you do not seem to add many new 'words' to your vocabulary, but it will stretch your vocabulary very soon after you have mastered more of them.
Learn High Frequency Chinese Characters
It has been pointed out that:
The most frequently-used Chinese character ‘de 的’ makes up more 4% of the modern Chinese texts we read.
This means that you’d see the mandarin word ‘de 的’ appears 4 times in every 100 words you read.
It has also been pointed out that:
The 10 most frequently-used chinese characters -- 一，了，是，不，我，在，有，人， 这，个-- make up more than 15% of the Chinese texts.
So you'd see these 10 words appear 15 times in every 100 chinese words you read.
What’s more!
The most frequently-used 500 words appear in 75% of the texts, and the most frequently-used 1000 Chinese words cover 85% to 90% of the texts you read.
Learning Chinese Characters
We don't want to oversimplify things. We are not saying that by knowing the 10 most frequently used Chinese words, you'd be able to understand 15% of all Chinese texts you read -- since statistically they make up of 15% to text.
What we would like you to know is that if you can master the most frequently used Chinese characters, it would make the process of learning new words so much easier, since a character you learn can form many words in combination with other characters.
Bearing this in mind when learning any new Chinese word. Do not just learn new words, learn the key characters!
Read more about key Chinese characters.
Read more about learning Chinese.
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