Some foreigner friends of mine think that Chinese characters are “impossible” to master. What? 50000 characters?
The truth is, as other answers have stated, there are only 3500 common characters. As an average Chinese speaker, I had mastered all common Chinese characters before I graduated from primary school, in terms of writing and reading. (You can’t imagine how hard those Hong Kong students compete with each other in their examinations…)
I have seldom used a Chinese dictionary since I was 12. I have seldom met any unknown Chinese characters since I was 12.
Now as you have noticed, the learning curve between English and Chinese is quite different. In my humble opinion:
PS: A foreigner friend on Facebook just asked me: There is 10 times the common vocabularies in English, is 3500 characters really enough for daily communication for Chinese speakers? I am not a linguist, but my simple (and shallow) answer is that it is more than enough. Unlike English, Chinese bind characters together to form vocabularies. For an instance: horse(馬)+car(車) = carriage (馬車), fire(火)+car(車) = train (火車) etc. We use “old” characters to form “new” vocabularies. It is basically how modern Chinese works.