One of the parameters for rating your knowkedge of any language is the amount of vocabulary that you master. Of course, this truism holds for Chinese, too. Except that in Chinese it’s pretty easy to quantify the amount of vocabulary you are supposed to know at any point during your learning process: basically, it’s proportional to the number of characters you master. Thus, if you want to better speak, read or write Chinese, you need to know more characters. Let’s quantify this!

In Chinese, words are the combination of one or more characters. At Nuli! Nuli! we have ranked simplified Chinese characters by order of increasing frequency. Using this scale, we can easily compute the maximum number of words that you may know given the number of characters you know. Say, you know 100 simplified Chinese characters; because you are a very thorough and dedicated student, you know all the words and expressions from the CEDICT Chinese dictionary that contain these 100 characters. How many words is that? The answer is on the curve below, somewhere in the bottom-left corner:

If you know 100 characters, then you know at most 1289 words. That’s not bad actually!

And here is the traditional first blog post, so moving! Everything is still a bit rough around the edges currently, I’ll try to find some time to polish everything in the next couple of days.

Alright so who are we? We are Nuli! Nuli! (yeah, you guessed that much) and we want to change the way you learn Chinese characters. To be more precise, we will focus on simplified Mandarin sentences. All textual content was automatically sampled from Twitter. The tool was designed to appeal both to beginners with less than a month of Chinese classes and advanced learners with more than 3000 characters under their belt. Yeah, that sounds great, and I dearly want to convince you that it is Details of the method will be outlined soon. Until then feel free to try it out. The handbook is given in the “Help” section. Oh, by the way, it is entirely free.