Member since Mar 2009 ·
3 posts · Location: Vancouver, Canada
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I think there's a difference between "able to read" and "able to read without much difficulty". In my experience, i learned about 1000 characters through a series of intensive classes, but it wasn't enough to muddle through any books with any sort of satisfaction. Then last summer i discovered SRS and mnemonics, and i learned an extra thousand characters in july and august, and cemented my knowledge of the old ones that i thought i knew.
I found that around the 1500 character mark (i went through them mostly in frequency order, so this is mostly the most popular 1500 characters), i was able to read books finally. It was hard, since there were still many i didn't know, but at least the story was finally understandable and i was making good progress on the other characters just by reading.
Now with somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2000-2500 characters, i'm able to easily read stories by Lu Xun and other real content. I learn lots of new words and characters by doing so. I can really see how knowing 3000 characters would make things so much easier, but i'm just enjoying actually reading things right now so i don't really have the motivation to study single characters too much.
Overall, i'd say the barrier to reading is much lower than people think. You may hear numbers like "3000" and "4000" and think it'll take forever, but really i think the minimum you need to work hard to hit is 1500. Once you hit 1500, you'll get a feeling of satisfaction from actually recognizing so many characters in real books. This will motivate you to do more, and your reading level will go up from there. As someone once said, you get good at reading by reading. Even if you know 3000 characters, you aren't necessarily good at reading yet either. But don't place the bar too high. It's doable sooner than you think.
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