To understand 90 per cent of the content in Chinese publications, you have to learn only 900 characters.

The annual report on the state of the language in China released yesterday in Beijing rebuts the traditional idea that Chinese is an extremely difficult language to learn.

The research, jointly conducted by the Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission, is based on 910 million characters in 92,034 text files randomly chosen from 15 newspapers, 13 TV stations and the Internet. Though 1.65 million words are found in use in the files, only 110,000, or 7 per cent, are frequently used. The rest are mainly names of people, places and organizations, the report showed.

Only 11,000 words containing about 900 characters are considered to be frequently used words. They cover about 90 per cent of the file contents.

"That is to say, if you want to understand 90 per cent of the contents, you have to learn only 900 characters," said Li Yuming, director of the ministry's language information administration department. "If you want to understand only 80 per cent of publications, 4,000 words should be enough."

"This might convey a message, especially to foreign learners, that Chinese is not that difficult to learn."

The report, the first of its kind ever issued in China, also showed that a large number of characters, which were rarely used in the past, now appear more often in publications.

Among the first 7,000 characters ranked according to frequency of usage in the research, about 615 are not in the existing 7,000-character table of standard Chinese that was made in 1988.

"Because of the rapid social development and the emergence of new media formats, such as the Internet, the Chinese language is witnessing a fast development, maybe faster than it has ever had," Li said.

"Obviously, the current character table has lagged behind the development, and we're now drafting a new one," he said, adding that the research may serve as an important reference to the revision.

Sam Gor, a US student at Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU) who started learning Chinese three months ago, said he was encouraged to hear that only 900 characters would clear the way for his Chinese learning. "That's great," he said. "I've learned more than 300 characters."

But Yang Erhong, a linguistic professor with BLCU, warned that Chinese learners should not be that optimistic, as 900 characters may contain numerous meanings.

Source: China Daily