How many words to be known by beginner and elementary level Chinese learner?

[Jamuna]

Hi All,

How many words (to read, write and speak) should be known to a beginner and how many words for elementary level in Mandarin Chinese?

Thanks

Jamuna

[querido]

Through the end of 2009 the vocabulary of all of ChinesePod Newbie was about 450 words. Newbie+Elementary was about 2500 words.

Through the end of 2010 the vocabulary of all of CSLPod Elementary was 1250 words.

[Lyn]

according to the <<Chinese Express>>, there are 530 works for a beginner course. there are 1000 works in <<Boya Chinese>> elementary level. <<Chinese Express>> is very popular for English speakers to learn Mandarin, and <<Boya Chinese>> is used in university for learning Mandarin.

[OneEye]

How long is a piece of string?

If you don't define what you mean by "beginner" and "elementary", how can anyone possibly venture a guess? Not that such terms are especially useful anyway, but for instance, some people would say I'm "advanced". My course this term at the Mandarin Training Center is labeled "advanced". I'm able to read scholarly books in my field fairly easily, newspapers with little problem, and 古文觀止 with some difficulty, and I probably know 12-15,000 words or so. But I'd hesitate to call myself "advanced", because at this point I also know how much further I have to go in order to be "there".

If finishing an "elementary" level book, such as the Boya elementary book mentioned above, puts you into "intermediate" territory, then I'd have to disagree that 1000 words is "elementary". Then again, that's only because I have some vague notion of what "intermediate" should look like. So what does intermediate mean? Our definitions are likely to differ. And what comes after? How many levels can you divide a language into before it becomes ridiculous and overly arbitrary? But then of course a publisher can put whatever they want on the cover of a book.

The main thing to know is that you need to know more words than you do now. And then after that, you're likely to need even more.

[Shelley]

Have to agree with OneEye.

All you really need to know is you will aways find there is more to learn, this is one of the reasons I learn Chinese cos its a lifelong undertaking and should keep me busy for the rest of my life.

I don't worry too much about lables, you know what you know and as long as you know there is more to know you will be ok.

Good luck

[c_redman]

I wrote a blog post about this. Anyone could take a word test and also self-rank their skill level. The results were 1,000 for beginner and 4,000 for intermediate. There was no elementary option.

[chestnut818]

I think it doesn't matter how many words you know, but how many word you can use..I have a pic about this, it's from http://94.75.201.88:8186/products/?pid=18

[MandarinCslpod]

HSK(Chinese proficiency test) provides a list for your reference:

New HSK Vocabulary CEF(欧洲语言框架)

HSK6 5000 C2

HSK5 2500 C1

HSK4 1200 B2

HSK3 600 B1

HSK2 300 A2

HSK1 150 A1

[OneEye]

But...that was a joke, right? I mean, look at what CEFR C2 is supposed to look like:

• Can understand with ease virtually everything heard or read.
  
• Can summarise information from different spoken and written sources, reconstructing arguments and accounts in a coherent presentation.
  
• Can express him/herself spontaneously, very fluently and precisely, differentiating finer shades of meaning even in the most complex situations.
  

source

5000 words will get you there? Then what the hell am I doing wrong?

[renzhe]

HSK lists cover core vocabulary only. With 5000 words only, you have no chance in hell at passing HSK6, let alone a more stringent C2 test.*

* There are many people doubting the equivalence of the new HSK6 and the CEFR C2.

[laowai1980]

Interesting thread here.

A few points I'd like to share and ask.

The old HSK defines Beginner as 1000 words (800 characters), Elementary as 3000 words (1600 characters), I think that's a fair estimate?

c_redman, I took your tests here: http://www.zhtoolkit.com/posts/2011/06/skill-levels-quantified/

and scored about 9000 words and 1500 characters. From my own estimates, it's more like 5000-6000 words and 2000-2200 characters, so the tests need some fine-tuning. Perhaps the more advanced groups of words need more words tested to give a more exact percentage?

OneEye, you say you know 12-15 000 words, is this measured using c_redman's tool or your own estimates? My interest is to find out how many words are required to read newspapers. I am not able to read them yet, unless I am heavily armed with a dictionary and that can hardly be qualified as reading.

[imron]

My interest is to find out how many words are required to read newspapers.

I would say about 10,000 words give or take one or two thousand depending on the newspaper, the topic material, and the focus of your vocabulary acquisition.

By that last point, I mean that if you learn another 4,000 words on top of what you already know but those words are not all that relevant to what you might read in a newspaper, then you'll still find you have trouble.

Funnily enough, the best way to know what words you're likely to come across in a newspaper is to read newspapers. Which seems a bit chicken and egg, but you'll find that as long as you are learning the unknown words then as time goes by you'll be able to understand more and more, and by definition, you'll also be learning words you are likely to come across in newspapers.

Note: at first, it's probably good to limit yourself to a given number of new words a day and then stop, rather than try to learn all new words in an article.

[OneEye]

OneEye, you say you know 12-15 000 words, is this measured using c_redman's tool or your own estimates? My interest is to find out how many words are required to read newspapers. I am not able to read them yet, unless I am heavily armed with a dictionary and that can hardly be qualified as reading.

That was my own estimate. I just took c_redman's test out of curiosity, and it tells me about 17,000 words and 3000 characters, which puts me squarely in c_redman's high-intermediate category. That's how I would have categorized myself if asked, too.

I haven't spent a whole lot of time reading newspapers, especially recently, so I'm not as comfortable reading them as I am with, say, books on early Chinese phonology (which I've been reading a lot of lately). Over the summer I read a decent number of recent newspaper articles for class, so I have no doubt that if I focused on that for a while it would come back quickly.

I would strongly recommend paying attention to imron's advice if reading newspapers is your goal. Of course, it can be applied to anything you may want to read. Do some every day, even if it's only a little, and it will get easier.

[nicostouch]

There are different stages to being a beginner. In my experience of my first year learning Japanese... there we're roughly 3 important milestones in terms of vocabulary during that year.

First: the first 500 words.

Second: the first 1000 words.

Third: the first 2500 words.

At each one of those milestones I noticed significant changes in my comprehension (obviously). After the 2500 word mark you start to drift into the intermediate category. Then I noticed every 2500 ~ 3000 words after that I felt brought me up to the next level. So at roughly 5000 and 7500 and 10,000 I really felt big changes.

In terms of where you should aim as a beginner, for me the first 1000 words is really key. If you can nail the first 1000 then you are well on your way to having established the foundations of the language. After that it starts to get easier because sentences start to contain more known words than unknown words which makes acquiring new vocab that much easier.

[Northern_Lights]

I would be nice if there was a list somewhere of the most ferquently used words in Chinese (or any target language) for that matter. I have an app on my andorid that ranks the characters, however I am unsure what methodoly was used for the ranking.

[nicostouch]

http://www.cozychinese.com/?s=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cozychinese.com%2Fmost-common-chinese-words-and-phrases

Has a nice list where you can mouse over to see readings/definitions too aswell as audio. I couldn't find many resources that were a list of words because all that usually comes up is "most common characters".

[renzhe]

I would be nice if there was a list somewhere of the most ferquently used words in Chinese (or any target language) for that matter. I have an app on my andorid that ranks the characters, however I am unsure what methodoly was used for the ranking.

The HSK vocabulary lists are based on frequency and importance. They are not ranked, but are grouped into levels. It's probably the best thing around, and old lists have about 9000 words, which is plenty to get your started.

[Northern_Lights]

The HSK vocabulary lists are based on frequency and importance. They are not ranked, but are grouped into levels. It's probably the best thing around, and old lists have about 9000 words, which is plenty to get your started.

Thanks for the tip. I real challenge is learning how to use the words, as opposed to just learning the words themselves.

[renzhe]

Yes, and I really think that exposure to native-level materials is crucial there.