According to the “ Survey of Chinese characters and words used in Medium” in a report called “The Chinese Situation in China of 2012 ” published by Government :
Previous survey results show that the amount of words in the corpus stabilize around 10,000 in10 million Chinese characters times, the number of words species stabilize around 2.3 million.The characters Which covers 80%, 90%, 99% of the words species were in 590,960,2400 around, the coverage number of words species which reached 80%, 90%, 95% were in 4800,14000,30000 around, they form a relatively stable annual media language part.
In other words, if you have mastered 590 Chinese characters and 4,800 words, you can basically understand the media on 80% of the information.
If you have mastered 960 characters and 14000 words, then you must be very good.
So, how many Chinese characters do you know ？
Thats really interesting! And gives me more courage to learn Chinese, because i felt like i had to learn a millions of different charachters, and i felt beaten before i even really started!
Hi, ceimzo
There is a Chinese saying "好钢要用在刃上（Good steel should be used for the making of the sword's cutting edge）”.
That means you must focus on waht's important.
After all, time is the most treasurable thing.
If you are a beginer to chinese, you should read this article I wrote.
https://medium.com/chinese-and-so-on/559e167f2da1
I hope that is helpful for you.
