That’s another ‘China Myth’, right?
But the truth is: a Chinese character is not an English/Latin letter, but it is a word, or even a phrase.
If you could recognize 1500 Chinese characters you can use Weibo/WeChat and you can read most of the daily use information printed in Chinese language.
If you learn 3500 Chinese characters you can read books, newspaper and live a normal life in China, you can get a job easily.
If you learn 7000 common used Chinese characters you can read any material in college level or in very specific researching fields.
You don’t have to know more than 7000 characters to be a lawyer, a doctor or a teacher.
The 7001st Chinese character and more are only for linguists or historians, even though there are more than 25000 characters, but you should know, many of them are derivations or variants of the ‘7000ers’ or some of them were just had been used historically.
Compared with this, I remembered there are more than 1 million English words exist in the world, you can’t understand a lecture in college if you know less than 6000~8000 words.
I don’t think you can read the English used in medicine, legal, bio-chemistry, psychology or such fields if you don’t know more than 10000 words. There are freaking grammars, freaking ‘borrowed’ words from French, Latin, German, etc. in such fields and some ‘English’ words you may never use in your every day life. They are hard as hell, and some relative clauses, the ‘longer’ sentences, are worse than hell in legal English.
The so called “pros” (professionals) in such fields, just learn those craps for years and years to make sure that you don’t know what they are talking about, while they are really speaking ‘English’ to you.
This situation doesn’t exist in Chinese language, a lawyer can explain some cases very clearly to a peasant in China in very FORMAL language, and that’s not because we are smart, it is just because our language is simple.
As a pupil in an elementary school in China, he or she just need to learn around 200 characters per semester, it means only 40 characters per month, 2 characters per day approximately. After 6 years study he or she will master 2400~2500 characters, in the middle school there are another 1500 characters, when the kid is 16 years old he or she just know more than 4000 characters.
And that’s quite enough for the kid to use for his/her entire life.