Comment by DiogenesKynikos
4 years ago
If you look at a frequency list of Chinese characters,[0] the top 4800 characters make up about 99.9% of modern texts.
That means that if you know 4800 characters, and you read a text that is 1000 characters (equivalent to around 700 words) long, there's likely one character you won't recognize.
The funny thing is, if you recognize only the top six characters, you already know 10% of the characters in a typical text. The distribution is very top-heavy, but with a long tail that you do have to learn to become literate.
0. https://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/li...
A now vanished Chinese restaurant near us was named in English 'The Good Earth', but in Chinese even I with near zero knowledge could read 'Three Big <somethings>'; never found out what that last character was and couldn't imagine what would make sense in context either!
大三元. It's a Mahjong reference.[0]
By the way, those are the 17th, 125th and 370th most common characters in modern written Chinese.
0. https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/zh/%E5%A4%A7%E4%B8%89%E5%85%83