The 500 most common Chinese characters

How this list was counted

There is no single official ranking of Chinese characters by use: every list is counted from some collection of text, and the order changes with it. This one comes from the word list of the Android Open Source Project's pinyin keyboard, about 55,000 words and characters, each with a frequency. A character's score is the sum of the frequencies of the words it appears in, and the 500 with the highest scores are listed here. The ranking is an estimate.

The word list was made for a phone keyboard, and it shows: 呵 (hē, as in the laugh 呵呵) is number 50 and the particle 吧 (ba) number 62, higher than in a count of newspaper text, while words of law or science rank lower. The readings come from the same data, with tones from pinyin-pro, and the Traditional forms from the OpenCC tables, in the forms used in Taiwan.

How many characters do you need?

China's 1988 list of frequently used characters in modern Chinese (现代汉语常用字表) names 2,500 common and 1,000 less common characters. In the texts counted for it, the 2,500 made up 97.97% of all characters and the 3,500 together 99.48%. Taiwan's Ministry of Education lists 4,808 common characters (常用國字標準字體表).

In the word list behind this page, the first 100 characters make up about 44% of everything counted and the first 500 about 79%. A short list takes you a long way into ordinary text, but not all the way: the characters after the first 500 are rare one by one and common together.

The first 100: the small words of every sentence

Most of the first 100 characters are the words every sentence needs: pronouns (我, 你, 他), the verbs to be and to have (是, 有), the negations (不, 没), particles (的, 了, 吗) and numbers. Many of them are used mostly inside two-character words, so learn them that way:

Characters with more than one reading

Some characters are read in more than one way, and the meaning goes with the reading. The list gives the most frequent reading first and the others after it: 行 is xíng in 行人 (pedestrian) and háng in 银行 (bank); 了 is le after a verb and liǎo in 了解 (to understand); 地 is dì in 地方 (place) and de in 慢慢地 (slowly).

Tones also change in speech. 一 and 不 take a different tone before some syllables (一个 yí ge, 不是 bú shì), and many characters lose their tone at the end of a word, as 子 in 孩子 (háizi). The list shows the reading of a character on its own. How the four tones and the tone changes work

Simplified and Traditional characters

Mainland China and Singapore write Simplified characters; Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau write Traditional ones. About two in three of these 500 characters are written the same way in both (的, 是, 我, 你). Switch the list to Traditional to see the Traditional forms large.

Simplification sometimes merged two or more characters into one, so one Simplified character can stand for several Traditional ones: 发 is 發 in 发现 (to discover) and 髮 in 头发 (hair), 面 is 面 (face) and 麵 (noodles), 后 is 後 (after) and 后 (queen). Where that happens, the list shows all the forms in the small line. Convert whole texts between Simplified and Traditional

Learning basic Chinese characters with the list

Pinyin helps you learn the sound, and teachers often warn that learners end up reading the pinyin instead of the character. Hide the pinyin, read a row of characters aloud, then tap each one to check yourself and hear it. Start with the first 100, then move on to 250 and 500.

Copy as a list gives one character per line with its rank, the other form, the pinyin and, for the first 100, the meaning, separated by tabs: paste it into a spreadsheet or a flashcard app. To see whole sentences with pinyin, paste them into the converter: Chinese to pinyin converter

The ranking and the readings are derived from the word list of the Android Open Source Project's pinyin keyboard, used under the Apache License 2.0, with tones from pinyin-pro and Traditional forms from the OpenCC tables. The meanings were written for this page. Sources and licences

Characters on signs, menus and labels

A list teaches characters one at a time. On a sign, a menu or a label they come mixed with rarer ones. HanCam reads printed Chinese with the camera of your iPhone or iPad and shows the characters with their pinyin, tone marks included, and the meaning. The meaning is in your phone's language where Apple's on-device translation offers it, and in English otherwise. Once the language pack is downloaded, it works offline.

Questions and answers