There are some 10,000 Chinese characters in common use. Basic literacy, according to the Chinese government, starts at two thousand characters. A solid grasp of a daily Beijing newspaper requires ...

Knowledge of more than 20,000 characters is required for serious scholarship, mastering 1,000 is a requirement for basic literacy, but learning 200 will allow newbies to make sense of street signs ...

Mandarin Chinese is the most common language in the world, estimated to be spoken by more than 1.2 billion people in countries like China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia. With so many ...

DeFrancis cites the "increasing vernacularisation of the Chinese writing style" as a potential factor in the death of characters. Academic and literary Chinese are dense forms of the language ...

I learned Chinese as an adult, first in Beijing in the mid 1970s. Being in Beijing, I was taught simplified characters. In later full-time study in Hong Kong, I learned the traditional forms.