How Many Chinese Characters Are There?

There are roughly 50,000 Chinese characters in the standard national dictionary, with some dictionaries even going up to 80,000. Most of these characters aren’t commonly used, though–you only need to know around 2,000 Chinese characters to be literate. By 3,500 characters, you’ll recognize nearly 99.5% of modern Chinese writing, while college-educated people know around 8,000 characters. To get more news about chinese letters alphabet, you can visit shine news official website.

Traditional Chinese vs. Simplified Chinese
Traditional characters make up the large majority of all Chinese characters. According to the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters, there are 8,105 simplified characters, although that number also includes characters that remain the same in both Chinese forms.

The government began simplifying characters in the 1950s. By 1986, over 2,000 characters were simplified. Comparing the numbers of all simplified characters versus the characters that have been simplified, experts guess that the current number of new simplified characters is around 3,000 or so.
If you’re not sure whether to learn traditional or simplified, it all depends on your purpose for learning Mandarin. Traditional Chinese is preferred in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, so if you plan on traveling or moving to any one of those places, you’re better off studying the traditional form. If you’re headed to the mainland, Singapore or Malaysia, simplified Chinese is the way to go.

Now that you know how many characters are out there, you might be wondering if there’s an alphabet system in place, and how many letters there are.

The truth is that there is no Chinese alphabet.

There are some who refer to the pinyin system as the Chinese alphabet, but that’s inaccurate. Yes, pinyin uses the Latin alphabet to show how you’d say Chinese characters, but pinyin letters are only used for pronunciation purposes and not for creating words.

It’s a little confusing, and it doesn’t help that there are 26 letters in both the English alphabet and the pinyin system. Just know that unlike the letters of Western alphabets, Chinese languages don’t rely on pinyin letters to formulate characters and words.
Chinese Radicals and Components
Instead, Chinese characters are composed of building blocks known as radicals and components.

Radicals index and categorize characters. Basically, they’re like the first letter of English words we use to look them up in a dictionary. While you can look up words online using pinyin, it’s still pretty handy learning this classification for Chinese characters.
For the most part, characters contain one main radical, which you can usually find either on the left or top of the character. There are 214 radicals in total.

One example of a radical is 匚 (fāng) which means “box,” and it’s included in characters like 区 (qū) meaning “area” and 匠 (jiàng) meaning “craftsman.”

Moving onto components. We briefly touched on components earlier, but let’s discuss them in further detail.
To complicate things, Chinese characters can represent standalone words. They can also represent components for creating other words, ideas and concepts. 女 and 马 are perfect examples of characters that are standalone words, as well as components for building other characters.

That means the combinations of characters like those form all kinds of words, which is great news for Chinese learners. Basically, a handful of Chinese characters can be combined and reorganized to express a wide variety of ideas—you don’t need to learn a new Chinese character for every new object or action that you encounter.