In Chinese, how many charcters are used?

chinese has character and not letters. each of the characters is like a picture unto itself. the word for rain looks like a window with drops of rain on the outside...

students learn over 22,000 characters but only 15000 are needed for everyday use

In Chinese, characters are used to form phrases and sentences. Each character is made up of lines and strokes. There is a system called Pinyin which is used to help foreigners learn how to pronounce words. Pinyin uses the letters in the alphabet, minus the v (it's replaced by a u with 2 dots on top). There are over 10,000 characters in Chinese, but only around 5,000 are needed to perform tasks such as reading the newspaper.

Hope this answers the question that's been on your mind.=D

You need to learn about 3,500 characters to recognize 95% of the contents of a newspaper. To recognize 98% you need to learn 9,000.

Of course, the Chinese have no problem reading a newspaper, because even without knowing all the characters, they understand the meaning from the context. And sometimes you don't have to know the exact meaning, anyway. (I don't know every word of my native language, either)

In the People's Republic of China there was a series of spelling reforms in the fifties and sixties. About 1,000 of the most commonly used characters were simplified.

So if you learn Chinese in the PRC you will have a hard time understanding a Hong Kong or Taiwanese newspaper, because they still use traditional characters.

In short: you will not be able to learn and remember all characters, but learning about 4,000 will be sufficient.

Chinese characters are called Hanzi. (sounds like hahn zeh) They are pictograms and ideograms. For exa mple the character for man ren (in mandarin) looks like 2 legs. 人 The character for big da (in mandarin) looks like a man holding out his hands 大.

Though most characters have evolved so they don't look like anything you would understand.

Chinese has no alphabet at all, only the characters.

Hope this helps.

There is an English transcription called hanyu pinyin that is used to help transliterate the characters in to readable English.

In this 1994 dictionary (Zhonghua Zihai) there are 85,568 characters.

Each character or "hanzi" (as I remember from my limited Mandarin lessons), is a seperate word or concept. It is not exact, and the sheer number of hanzi is not something I can tell you from the top of my head, although I believe the number is well over 10,000. However, I believe functional fluency can be obtained with only a couple thousand characters.

There's a reason Chinese is considered so difficult to learn!

chinese characters are words, and there are tooooonssss of characters!!

taiwan used to have an alphabet symbol for each letter but I don't if they still use it