However, the truth is that most Chinese scholars certainly don’t know 20000 characters. Chinese has a bazillion charactersįor some reason, it’s quite popular to first scare students and say that there are 20000 or 50000 characters, making Chinese sound impossible. In some cases, there are no exact answers, but I’ll try to provide different points of view here, as well as my own opinion.

200 characters to read menus, basic web pages and newspaper headlines.

A Chinese scholar knows 20000 characters.

The claims are different in different sources, but these are from ShaoLan’s talk: Instead, I want to address an issue which is common in product introductions and advertisements (not just the above TED talk), namely that of numbers relating to reading ability in Chinese. Even though I think the claim that learning to read Chinese is easy while learning to speak is hard is exactly opposite to most people’s experience, I’m not going to dwell on speaking Chinese now. This is especially true for Chinese, which has earned a reputation for being impossible to learn, which is evidently not true. In general, I think being encouraging and optimistic about language learning is good, even if some difficult and depressing facts are ignored or brushed over.

Please note that even though I use ShaoLan as an example here, what i say ought to apply to a lot of other people and products as well.įirst, let’s have a look at her TED talk, which is only six minutes long: Learn to read Chinese with ease? I’m also going to expand on my answers and discuss how some of the difficulties with learning to read Chinese can be overcome. Instead, I’m going to address some questions related to the content of her talk. I’m not going to bash either ShaoLan’s TED talk or her product (which I haven’t seen) this has already been done by others. So I tried ignoring ShaoLan’s Learn to read Chinese… with ease! and similar discussions about learning Chinese characters, but since I still receive recommendations to watch her TED talk (mostly from people who don’t study Chinese) and questions about the content (mostly from people who do study Chinese), I think it’s time to write a little bit about learning to read Chinese.

Chineasy ted talk