They are right and I do agree that “the order of characters in a frequency list might not reflect how a beginner would talk”.

Anyway, please let me tell my opinion after having lost my hair in Beijing when I was a beginner:

A beginner who wants something “useful” and “relevant” doesn’t care at all Chinese characters!

You want to teach “useful” and “relevant” Chinese, right? The word is: pinyin!

In my textbook, lesson 1 was really very “useful” and “relevant”, I’m not joking, it was just what I wanted to say as a beginner: Mary says to David “How do you do?” and then “How are you?” and “Very well” and “I’m very well too”… but it came with 15 Chinese characters to learn and memorize!

Lesson 2 was about professor Li and professor Wang greeting each other and “How is your health?” and “Thanks” and “Goodbye” etc…. WITH 25 MORE CHINESE CHARACTERS!

You author of those lessons, do you know what I think?

Option 1: You are Chinese, so, I do understand, you don’t know, yes, don’t know how difficult is for me, an Italian beginner, to learn Chinese characters;

Option 2: You are completely out of mind, please see a good physician.

So, want to be relevant and useful? Go with pinyin.
Want to teach characters? Go with the most commonly used first, and only a few each day.

My two cents.

Giuseppe Romanazzi
WearYourChineseName.com

that is not a bad idea at all. I’ll consider doing this soon!

What I mean is, to take all the vocab words in a certain HSK list, say level 5, dump all of the individual characters that appear there, and run this analysis on each one. Of course the output would be many times larger than the original list, but if you could filter it by frequency, it might be really useful…

One afternoon I coded up a Chinese boggle style game. It would grab 20 – 25 characters and then you’d have to figure out as many words as you could from the characters.

An interesting thing I noticed: when I tried making it easier by putting a higher percentage of common characters, the game actually got harder. Lots and lots of obscure words. Totally useless for studying.

I agree with Olle: we need to find better ways of finding relevant characters for Chinese learners to study.

thanks for the comment.

I completely agree. I think frequency lists, especially character lists, although fascinating in their own right, might limited in their solution as you mentioned.

You know, now that I think about, Chinese would be on the few languages where we actually would like to look at a frequency list based on the graphemes. I mean, in English we don’t look at frequency lists for letters of the alphabets.

I’m making bad comparison here, I know, but it sometimes feels the same.

Because, Chinese orthography is such a complex system, finding the relationship between characters and the vocabulary is an interesting question in itself.

I think that’s what we are trying to answer here. How can we find the best characters to learn that will enable us to promote efficient, effective (and fun!) vocabulary learning?

Another thing to consider, is radicals too!

If you want to chat about this more, send me an email, we can maybe do some research together.

Then there’s the corpus to consider, which could be influenced by any number of factors, and what is ‘frequent’ (as mentioned by lots of people above) – spoken word, written word, age groups, geographical location all influence this. Thinking on, maybe an all-encompassing frequency list might not be a solution to any useful question, but rather focused lists, that concentrate on distinct groups of people or topics, since this is how our lives are based anyway, would be more useful.

thanks for the comment.

Yes, regular expressions. Ooh boy. I have heard of this elusive thing. I’m going to definitely read up a bit more on it. It makes sense. I understand regular expressions, but making statements for them is where I lack the knowledge. I’ll ask my brothers for help, they are better programmers than I.

Your last point is true. I remember asking people on the Chinese Language stackexchange section how 要是 became “if”, but the general response was, it just is. It’s like asking how “if” became “if”.