Let me pour a giant bucket of cold water on this.
[[ As a normal adult, you will never learn enough Chinese characters to be read a book, newspaper or website ]]
I am sorry, but that’s just the truth of the matter.
The “common wisdom” according to Dr. Google is that you need to learn 3,000 characters to become “literate” in Chinese. But this is a lie. It counts only characters, not words. It is entirely possible to know all the characters of a word (usually just 2) and still not know the meaning of the word.
Here’s an example of this:
共产主义
All 4 characters here are basic, 1st grade-level characters.
共 – gong4: together
产 – chan2: manufacture
主 – zhu3: owner
义 – yi4: honor
OK, so what does the whole 4-character word mean? Honorable owners who manufactures together?
No, it means communism.
Communist China when you only know 2,000 Chinese characters
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So the real question is: “how many words do I need to learn in order to read Chinese?”
The answer is: “too many”.
Sure, most of the words can be inferred from the character combinations alone. Hell, sometimes you can guess the meaning from the context and just recognizing one of the characters. But you’ll be stumbling along and confusing yourself all the time.
Then there’s the problem of slang, especially internet slang that is ever evolving and chaotic as all hell. Modern Chinese internet slang mixes multiple languages, Roman letters, numbers, cryptic historical references and all kinds of other nonsense. Even I have a hard time keeping up, and my Chinese is nearly native.
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Now, are there people out there with the special kind of autism that allows them to hyperfocus on learning Chinese who have achieved a Chinese adult level of literacy?
Yes, there are. But you’re not one of them; you don’t have the power of their autism.
This American girl, Lila, has the special kind of turbo-autism that has allowed her to master the Chinese spoken language as well as any human can. Her spoken Chinese is 99.99% native. But even for her, college level Chinese language tests are a serious struggle. I’d guess her character count to be around 6,000.
None of the other “Chinese learners” on YouTube are even close to Lila. Some are almost at her level in spoken, but not in written. And these are people who’ve dedicated years, decades to studying Chinese while living in China.