Welcome back, in this lesson we will answer two important questions. First, is a character
a word? And second, how many characters should you plan to learn. The short answer to the
first question is sometimes. Sometimes a character is a word but often it's not. Let me explain.
As you know by now, some chinese words are just one syllable. Like the word, rén , person,
shuǐ water, dà big, shū book. Each of those single syllable word is represented by just
one character. So in those cases the character is a word. In ancient chinese, nearly all
words were single syllable. So they were represented by one character like that. But in modern
chinese, many words are two or more syllables. Suck as míng bái understand, péng yǒu
friend and zì xíng chē bicycle. In those cases, there is one character for each syllable.
And those two or more characters combined for one word. So you can think of it like
this, the character is a basic unit. It always represents one syllable. Sometimes one syllable
or unit is a word on it's own, but sometimes two or more syllables or units must be combined
to make a word. Now remember how I said it in the last lesson that characters contain
components, which are like building blocks. I told you the great news that the more you
learn, the easier it gets to put them together to form new characters. Well, here's another
piece of good news for you. Chinese words also act like building blocks. So the principle
of the more you learn the easier it gets also apply here. Now let's take a look at this
word, rén kǒu population. It contains two characters, rén person and kǒu mouth. If
you take the time to learn these two characters rén and kǒu , as well as another two characters
cái that means talent and qì that means air. You can then put these four characters
together to form six different words. So you see. Since chinese words are often formed
by characters that are found in lots of other words. When you learn just a few characters,
you get exponential growth of knowledge of chinese words. And it just keeps compounding.
For this reason , when I teach you a new character, I'm gonna take the time to show you other
words that it's found in. I want you to get a good understanding of different ways that
one character is used in combination with other characters. So that you will be prepared
to recognize it in various compound words. In this case, ensuring quality of study and
focusing on words definitely makes more sense than going for quantity of characters. Speaking
of quantity of characters, the second question that I want to discuss here is how many characters
should I plan to learn? If you have ever google this question, you know that there are lots
of ideas out there about how many characters you need to know. The general consensus is
that you need 3000 thousand to read a newspaper. Some say you need less, some say you need
more. Here's what I say, take a deep breath and relax. It might be true that you need
to know 3000 characters if you plan to read economist in chinese, but if you want to be
able to communicate with chinese friends by emails or text message, and to feel comfortable
with some basic chinese street signs, then you can probably do that with less than 500
characters under your belt. Take a look at this chart. By knowing just 100 of
the most frequently used characters, you can understand about 42 % of written chinese and
by knowing just 200 of the most frequently used characters, you can understand more than
half of any given chinese text. So the point here is that just a little bit of work goes
a very long way. That's way I am gonna take a advantage of that building block nature
of chinese words and just focus on teaching you those most commonly used characters. Well
I'll talk more about it next time. Alright, see you next time. Zài jiàn.