There are over 50,000 Chinese characters and it would be an absolute superhuman feat to remember anything even remotely close to that
- 1,500 to 2,000 would see you ok for general day-to-day stuff like shopping and getting around town
- 2,500 to 3,000 and you could read about 90% of all printed media in China
- 3,500+ is pretty much full fluency
It’s important to stress that this only applies to reading fluency, not speaking fluency
You could be able to speak and understand Chinese like a native but not be able to read more that a few base characters
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Context Clues
Chinese is a pictographical script, and so characters often contain within them contextual clues to their meaning known as “radicals”
If we take the character meaning “to swim”, which is 泳
That contains within it the radical for “water”, which is 水
So even if you don’t know the character for swimming, you know it’s definitely something water related and you may be able to gleam from context its meaning
This allows you to essentially read way more than just the few thousand characters as mentioned above, as through context and deduction you can generally have a decent guess at what a Chinese character means if you already know its radical
Not all radicals are contextual however, and some are there to aid in phonetics
Blue: Contextual radical for “birds”
Red: Phonetic radical for “Ba” sounds