Recently someone asked me, How many characters (hanzi or kanji) are there in Chinese and Japanese?

Question

OK I knew that there are some limitations in Japanese; e.g., touyou kanji, the general limitation of kanji used in newspapers and magazines... and kyouiku kanji the ones prescribed in education... what numbers are these? And, I have no idea of any limitations in Chinese and I believe that Koreans also use the ideographs?

Answer 1

It is said that some 50,000 kanji exist. However, many kanji are not necessarily used in daily life. The Japanese Ministry of Education designated 1,945 characters as Jooyoo Kanji, which are the most frequently used characters. It would be very helpful to learn all Jooyoo Kanji, but the basic 1,000 characters are sufficient to read about 90% of the kanji used in a newspaper (about 60% with 500 characters). Since children's books use less kanji, they would be a good resource to practice your reading
Kanji is a mixing of Chinese characters with Japanese words. When reading Chinese characters, they can be said in Japanese with many sounds - the Chinese sound and the Japanese word. For example, the character for "person" can be read as jin, nin, hito, bito, ri, and several other sounds.
Kunyomi is original Japanese reading, and Onyomi is basically
taken from the Chinese kanji-reading style and conveyed to Japan.)

1: Kunyomi: OO, OOki
2: Onyomi: Da, Dai
I find it is more easier to read Kunyomi than Onyomi kanji..

Answer 2

In Chinese, there is about 40-50 thousand Characters (hanzi). This includes ancient characters that are not in use (much) anymore.
However, to read over 95% of a paper, you only need to know 3000 or so. knowing 4000, lets you read 97%, 5000 98%, 6000 99% - so not much difference between knowing 3000 and 6000.

Answer 3

There are about 65,000 Hanzi Chinese characters but only around 10,000 are used but only 3,000 of those are used often. Between 5 and 6,000 would be considered literate and new words are created from these common ones by combining them in different ways or redefining old words and phonetically transcribing foreign words. The same methods are used in other languages including English

Answer 4

If you made the decision in understanding to talk Chinese then you must now that the ideal choice is a Program for Mandarin.

Answer 5

I don't know about Chinese, but Japanese has approximately 2000 of them.

Answer 6

yea i learned this in school but they have unlimited characters i forgot why lol .