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A participant writes Chinese character "biang" during a Writing "Biang" event held in Xi'an, capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi province, April 13, 2014. Used in the name of Biangbiang noodles, a popular type of noodle in Shaanxi, the 57-stokes Chinese character "biang" is one of the most complex Chinese characters in contemporary usage. [Photo/Xinhua]
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When it comes to learning Mandarin, you need to start from learning hanzi, or Chinese characters. So you may ask how many hanzi a foreigner should know to survive in China, assuming all Chinese don’t speak English. Before telling you the answer, I think it is necessary to give you a clear picture of the progress of Chinese characters since ancient times.
If you happened to live in the Qin Dynasty (221-206BC), the dictionaries had 3,300 hanzi in total. It seems like it’s not much. But in the Western Han Dynasty (206BC-AD24), the figure increased to 9,353. About 300 years later, the Chinese vocabulary had been increasingly expanded. In the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the number of hanzi exceeded 20,000 and in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), the figure was 31,319. During the reign of the Emperor Kangxi in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the emperor authorized 30 scholars to edit an official dictionary named Kangxi Zidian, which included more than 47,000 Chinese characters. In modern times, the version of Zhonghua Da Zidian in 1915 had 48,000 hanzi. In 1971, the Zhongwen Da Cidian edited by Zhang Qiyun included 49,888 hanzi. It may surprise you that the dictionary Zhonghua Zihai, published in 1994, had more than 85,000 hanzi. But don’t worry. Most of them are dead words because Chinese people no longer use them.
Actually, in our daily life, only 6,000 to 7,000 Chinese characters are used frequently. When informed of that, I think you may breathe a sigh of relief. But wait! If you want to read some Chinese classics to have a further knowledge of Chinese culture, how many hanzi you should know?
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