hi all,
I wonder where is the furthest point of achievement (characters/words learned) among Skritter users - since the service was first launched? That is, where is the top achiever and has he/she already read the Red Temple?
Some inspiration would do us good.
Cheers
Alex

Two users that I know of have learned more than 5000 characters, one of whom learned 5000 simplified characters, and one of whom learned a mix of simplified and traditional. As far as words, I haven't been paying close attention, but I know of several users with around 8000, and I would guess that there are some with more that I just don't know about.

I am not sure how much people have then gone and done with the Chinese/Japanese they learned on Skritter, although judging by the forum, some of y'all are total knights!

I know breaking 1,000 characters was a huge psychological accomplishment for me. In fact whenever I read someone's post in the form, I look at their profile to see how many characters they've learned.

It's a little silly because once you start to know 2,000+, characters don't matter so much anymore; how many words you know is more important.

In fact, I used to have a goal of learning 50 characters a week. I would go through a text book, or Chinese pod, or other resources, and study enough chapters or pages until I had learned 50 characters that week. I would also be learning all of the words in that lesson that used characters I already knew.

I'm finding that, in order to keep hitting that 50 character goal, I'm having to study a lot more chapters, and learn a lot more words each week with characters I already know. In order to learn 50 new characters, I have to learn 100 new words with characters I already know. I'm starting to wonder if that 50 character goal will be possible when i hit 2300 or 2500 characters.

atdlouis, I'm now at 3000+ and to add 50 a week, is pretty hard. What I do is besides other lists, I am also studying pure character lists, e.g. the 3000 most used characters. Once a new character is popping up, I use the magnifying glass and see in which words this character is used and then add the most useful to a study list. Every now and then, I am turning on and off this list in order to not get overwhelmed by too many hard to learn characters.
Another list, which I've build, contains names, from Hu Jintao, Zhu Rongji over Chiang Kai-sheck, Soong Ai-ling to Andy Lau, Jet Li, Ge You etc. Here you also have a lot of characters, which don't occur often in a normal text, but more in names. It is also helpful, to know these characters, at least the pinyin, so that when you read a newspaper, you can decipher what is a name and can guess from the pronunciation what it might stand for. (I will share this list some when in October, it will contain then more than 250 useful names of Chinese people.)

Here's a basic question, and I've seen many answers none of which I really believe. What's the average size of a functional Chinese lexicon? One "good enough" to get you around and function normally in China? What about Japanese? For that matter, English? I'd love to compare those numbers to mine here at Skritter, and some of the uber-achievers here also just for kicks.

The size (amount) of the characters doesn't matter, it's how you use them that counts. At least thats what my chinese teacher said.

^^

In my oxford dictionary it says an educated Chinese knows roughly 8000 characters.

God knows how big a functional lexicon would be. Of course it depends (among other things) if you know the word but dont know the character (or confuse it etc) or just plain dont know the word. As with most things: it depends :P

@jcdoss I love the way there are so many authoritative answers to the question: how many characters do you need, and how they vary wildly.
http://books.google.com/books?id=FW1LuFYXtvQC&pg=PA13

I suspect it's a bit like a question about the number of vocabulary words you need to know in a given language. Do you know how many words you need to function normally in English? The question can't really be answered.

Using something like Skritter for English would be a special kind of nightmare for me! There are lots of words that I sort of know, some that I have sort of forgotten, some that are domain-specific and that I no longer need. How many words do I know? Who cares... Does that question even mean anything? For example, do I know the word "redolent"? Yeah, sort of: I wouldn't stumble on it if I read it or heard it, and I might even use it, but I'm not 100% sure I know its exact definition. How about "sasquatch", "boson", "gimp", "feldspar"?... Was Hemingway functional with less words than Joyce?

I know about 1000 characters now and am definitely not too functional. My goal is to be able to get the gist of the newspaper and of most of the signs when I walk around a Chinese city. Maybe with 2000 I can get close, but probably 3000 would be closer to the mark.

Thanks a lot guys, that's a great help!!! Figures are so important when You learn hard. Special thanks to Atdlouis, and also Roland for the names idea.

to share as well on the topic: my desire is (sometime in life but before I am 45, now it is 35) not just to "learn it" in a sense textbooks put into it, but to attain the ability to read and the "feel" for both modern and classic chinese literature, to dive deeper into the culture that an average chinese person does. Cause I believe this is a treasure in our world, something that has, in an uninterrupted way, survived to our day. The main obstacle to opening that spiritual world for a motivated outsider are the characters, it seems. And it seems they can well be done with, sooner or later, thanks to Skritter team :p

Another thought, talking of a language as a means to get access to a nation's spiritual heritage, I wonder whether anyone thought of the Tibetan. It is related to Chinese, and that's where fantastic heritage lives to our day... Or am I the only freak type with that kind of motivation here? :)

@Alex444 I don't know anybody who speaks Tibetan. It sounds like quite a challenge. On the other hand their writing system looks much easier to learn than 汉字.

As for the question of how much we need to learn, it seems like the number of words and chengyu that we need are endless. Knowing 2,000+ characters just means I can get confused by more combinations of things I supposedly understand.

James

A small consolation is that a fair number of the more "infrequent" or "advanced" characters are subcomponents of more common ones eg 懒 and 赖.

@Alex
I empathize with your motivations, though at the same time I feel that understanding the culture can't simply be done through Mandarin. China is really a very diverse place and the local cultures aren't just going to be understood through Mandarin. Even in a place like Shanghai, I have a difficult time communicating with my grandmother in law because she only speaks Shanghainese. I tried communicating with an old fellow in Kunming the other day and we couldn't talk at all because he only spoke the local dialect. In reality, I feel that the combination of Mandarin as a standard dialect for China and the economic pressures on families in China to have their kids learn English is actually leading to the death of many parts of Chinese culture carried on by local dialects. There are many I know whose children are learning Mandarin and English but not the local dialect. It's sad.

/ramble

艾山德
I wonder if there has/has not been efforts to save those local dialects from extinguishing - by documenting them and developing a proprietary writing system. Who if not the local people themselves should have done it? If a local language and the unique culture that goes with it are being swept away by history, I believe locals share the responsibility. Nobody managed to sweep away Jewish or, say, Greek culture - those guys wouldn't let it happen.
Cheers
Alex