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All chinese characters

Hi ChinesePod team, my question is this:

How many characters are there in all?

Hi Phillips,

Hi there!

In the entire written language of Mandarin, there are about 50,000 characters. However, don’t be discouraged! You only need to know around 2~3000 characters to read about 99% of the language. Moreover, there are about 409 sounds in Chinese pinyin. So even if you don’t know all the written characters, you can easily speak fluent Chinese just by learning the pinyin!

Hope this motivates you!

Betty