Talk:List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese

This article needs help...
The gods know I'm not the one to provide it, but until I came along this "article" used Chinese characters liberally for no justifiable reason. It claims that the list contains the "3500" (sic) most common characters, but merely copying all on the page into MS Word would reveal that the list only includes around 3,312 "Asian characters". The character 千 is listed twice as having 11 strokes. Well, forgive me, but it looks more like 3 to me. The same goes for several others. elvenscout742 20:49, 1 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Wow, this article does need help. I'll get to it asap. -- ran (talk) 21:24, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Traditional?
Is there a similar list but in traditional characters?


 * Yes, there is a traditional characters table and came earlier than the simplified one. I suggested that separating the simplified characters table with the traditional one. --HeiChon~XiJun 01:38, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Sorted by frequency
It would be great if the list was sorted by frequency. --Abdull 15:34, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

URL Underline Causes Problem?
It seems to me that underlines of a URL of a character does more harm to reading it. Is it possible to remove the underline? Robbyjo 04:21, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikisource
Since this article appears to be just a copy of a list that was published by another source (People's Republic of China), it looks to me like it would fit in better over at Wikisource. This article could remain as an article about the list, rather than being a verbatim copy of it. Bryan 09:11, 13 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Yes, this page should be copied to Wikisource; it currently conflicts with WP:ELAC projects. --Sadi Carnot 15:48, 10 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Done. Bryan 07:12, 12 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I have nominated this Wikisource page for deletion, due to concerns about provenance and copyright. see s:WS:PD#Xiàndài Hànyǔ Chángyòng Zìbiǎo.  I do not wish for the page to be deleted entirely - I hope the discussion will help us find out the appropriate place and format for it. John Vandenberg (talk) 07:53, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Dead link; my good luck in downloading a copy
I was very interested in obtaining a copy of the chart (or list, or table...), and succeeded, but at some point, the link had gone dead. I decided to test Google Search — I carefully copied the Chinese name of the character subset from this page and copied it (as Chinese characters: 现代汉语常用字表 (Different heights?!)) into Google's search field (using Firefox), and in a very reasonable time, was rewarded with a number of hits with red-highlighted Chinese in the hit titles. The summary* of one of the first hit strongly suggested that this might be the list I was looking for. I don't recall how, but I saved the list as an HTML file. (P.S. Probably, had no difficulty in doing so.) It was a delightful experience!
 * 《现代汉语常用字表》. 常用字(2500字)次常用字(1000字). 笔画顺序表. 一画 一 乙. 二画 二 十 丁 厂 七 卜 人 入 八 九 几 儿 了 力 乃 刀又 ...

[The Babelfish translation add-on to Firefox says that 常用字 is "vocabulary", and 次常用字 translates as "Times used the word" -- perhaps word frequency, or most-frequently-used characters?]

The list surely looks like a traditional dictionary lookup table that lists characters by stroke count.

When the page renders in Firefox in my machine, what seems to be every 16th character space fails to render, placing the next character in the line right next to the preceding one, instead of spacing it for legibility. However, resizing Firefox's window for 16 characters per line offers a clean display.

Trying naively (i.e., letting the system choose the application) to render the saved file to screen doesn't work well at all; there are lots of unrecognized-character boxes. However, F3 (View [file]) in the Krusader file manager seems to render the file just fine. It takes a few seconds to settle, but a casual look at stroke count seems OK.

I just tested this again, to be sure I'm recalling correctly.

Here's the URL:  (Remember not to include the !)

There might be some seconds delay before it starts rendering. It takes a while, even in a reasonably-modern machine (Athlon 64-bit, 2.2 GHz approx, ADSL at actual 1.3 MB/s approx. max., openSUSE 11.1.)

Apparently, "zibiao" ("zhibiao"?) is the short name; it fails badly as a search term in Google.

For what it's worth, I'm a dilettante student of the Chinese and Japanese writing systems, but hardly serious, and most assuredly not diligent about it; iirc, "dilettante" comes from a root meaning "delight". I'm still in the quite-early stages of learning, although I can easily tell if a Chinese character is poorly written or (worse) a fake.

As to copyright, I'd say that a link should be OK. That seems to have been done.

Best regards, Nikevich (talk) 15:09, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Why is this article titled in Chinese, not English?
This is the English-language version of Wikipedia. It seems to me wholly inappropriate to title articles in other languages, even if like this one, they have been transliterated into the Roman alphabet. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Floozybackloves (talk • contribs) 18:33, 26 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree, and I've changed the title.--Wester (talk) 14:55, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Updated link
The link to the list isn't working now, but there's a working link at http://www.china-language.gov.cn/wenziguifan/shanghi/013.htm or http://www.china-language.gov.cn/wenziguifan/shanghi/013c.htm The website looks official.

Could someone take a look and maybe put the link in? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.212.155.246 (talk) 16:01, 11 July 2012 (UTC)