Our Baseline: 136 Out of 500

So, we have a list of 500 most-frequently-used Chinese characters, it's time to do another test. I copied the characters directly off this page, and pasted them into Excel. Then I stripped off the Pinyin and rearranged into five columns, each for 100 characters. This prints out into three pages.

Last time when I did a character recognizing test with my daughter, I asked her to mark the characters with "+", "check", and "-", for words she definitely knew, she thought she knew but couldn't tell, and not knowing at all. That method was not entirely effective and she got tired and it went on. So this time we tried something simpler: she just checks off any characters she knew.

Here is the result:

1. From 1-100: known 46
2. 101-200: 27
3. 201-300: 15
4. 301-400: 19
5. 401-500: 29

The total is 136 out of the 500.

As noted in the previous post, this kind of tests has several weaknesses, mostly because it asks her to recognize characters without pronunciation help or context. But nonetheless, I think this is as good a baseline measurement as we could get, as far as learning characters go. She certainly knows some more characters that are not in this list, but probably not much. (In that other test, she recognized 100 characters out of about 300, which was a more limited sample.)

We will come back to this later on as one measure of our progresses.