Learn Key Chinese Words
to multiply vocabulary
Just like learning other languages, you will have to build up a vocabulary when you learn Mandarin Chinese.
The bigger the vocabulary, the more words will be at your disposal, and the better you will be in expressing yourself, making you a stronger speaker.
How many Chinese words do you have to learn before you can speak and write Chinese?
Well, it does not matter! Even if you have learned only 10 words, put them into use whenever opportunities arise. You don't have to wait until a reasonable size of vocabulary to be built up before you can speak and write.
I would, however, like to cautiously point out that although Chinese has more than 50,000 words characters, you don't need to learn many in order to be able to understand and speak Chinese.
As a guide, you need to know only about 500 characters to read simple books, and 2,000 or so characters to read a newspaper. The frequently used Chinese characters are, in fact, quite limited.
This, nevertheless, does not mean that building vocabulary of Chinese is easy. A character would combine with others in many ways to form new words. The meanings of some combination of words are pretty obvious, many others are less so.
Still, it is a relief to many. At least, if you can strategically master the most frequently used characters first, you're more likely to learn faster than those who don't.
Learn not to learn new words blindly. Learn the key Chinese words -- beginning with the basic characters! Read more to understand why.
Read about Chinese vocabulary building.
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