How many charectars or alphabets does mandarin language have??

2 Comments

1. Marilyn B says:

   August 27, 2009 at 12:00 pm

   "Chinese has many thousands of characters and it takes some training in order look one up by its shape. Characters share many components in common and each character has a prominent unit called the radical. In traditional dictionaries, you can look up a character by first finding its radical and then counting the remaining number of strokes needed to write the character. The dictionary has an index by radical and stroke count that you can then use to find the character. You can search by radical/stroke, pronunciation or English meaning at this site’s character dictionary http://www.mandarintools.com/chardict.html but it is designed as an Chinese to English dictionary, and not the other way around. Another good place to try is Zhongwen.com." Refer to the site below:
2. Lance F says:

   August 27, 2009 at 12:00 pm

   The University of Beijing claims to have accumulated all characters in existance and I believe they found a little more than 54,000 characters. However, the average Chinese student knows about 3,000, this is more than enough to get by. Scholars know about 10,000.