Chinese Characters

Hello,

How many chinese characters are there in all of the writing lessons combined? I preferred asking since counting them myself will require me to open all the lessons but I don't wanna do that so I can keep count of the lessons I have completed and those that I have not.

If someone has completed the course, could you please share as to how many total number of characters are there in the writing lessons (all 3 levels)?

Hi Zirik,

There are in total 519 characters from 151 entries from all 3 levels of writing lessons, including one introduction course.

As some of the entries are phrases, it's possible that a character from one entry comes up again in another entry. In level 3, we teach chengyus, which are unique four-worded idioms in Mandarin, and different chengyus could be consisted of the same character, so you will get some repetitive ones out of the 519. For example, both 乱七八糟 (luànqībāzāo) & 七上八下 (qīshàng-bāxià) use the numbers 七 (qī) “7” & 八 (bā) “8.”

Hope that answers your question; and wishing you a fun journey learning all of these wonderfully intricate characters & phrases! :) 

Hello Eleanor,

519 Characters don't even fully cover HSK 3, and HSK 4 requires atleast 1064 Characters (1200 for HSK 3.0). Instead of Chengyus shouldn't the focus be on completing atleast 1064 of the most common characters?

2000-3000 characters are required to read everyday stuff!

Thanks!

Hi Zirik,

Sorry if we weren’t being clear earlier. 519 applies only to our Writing Lessons, where the HSK expects you to write 300 characters for beginner’s levels (1~3). You should also be able to recognize 900 characters for the same level according to HSK, and that’s where our interactive Audio Lessons come in.

Hope that clarifies it. :)

Thanks Eleanor for the clarification,

I get that you're saying that for HSK there is a different number for writing characters and recognizing characters, and the latter one is the larger number.

You're team mentioned to me that the courses have around 6000 unique chinese characters in all levels combined. So that should cover the recognizing character part for even the advanced HSK level (all the way upto HSK 7-9) right?

The writing lessons cover around HSK 3-4.

Is that correct?

Hi Zirik,

Thank you for your question!

As Eleanor mentioned, there are a combined total of 519 characters taught across all three levels of our Rocket Chinese Writing Lessons. This figure refers specifically to the characters introduced in the Writing Lessons only.

For HSK Level 3, you need to recognize 900 unique characters. Across all three levels and lesson types of Rocket Chinese, we cover 6,000 phrases. Note that this number doesn't refer to our unique character count; instead, it refers to the cumulative number of vocabulary, phrases, and example sentences (which are made up of multiple characters) taught in Rocket Chinese. 
If we consider the 519 unique characters taught in the Writing Lessons, there are still 5,481 phrases remaining. Since this number refers to vocab, phrases, and sentences (rather than individual characters), unfortunately, we can’t identify how many of these characters are unique. The same characters likely appear multiple times across this count, so the unique character count will be significantly lower. Having said that, these 5,481 phrases include characters not introduced in the writing lessons, exposing you to new characters and helping with your character recognition for the HSK requirements.

In summary, excluding the unique characters taught in the writing lessons, it’s safe to assume that you will reach, if not be very close to reaching, the unique character recognition count of 900 required for HSK Level 3.

We hope this helps!