1,000 characters

The fastest way to reach a high level in a foreign language is through extensive reading.

Chinese presents a unique challenge to would-be readers. The Chinese writing system is one of the most difficult in the world.

Despite their difficulty, the characters do eventually become an aid in learning the langauge at the intermediate stage. The majority of words in Chinese are made up of two characters compounds. When you encounter a new word, you can often guess the meaning if you are familiar with the characters that make it up.

One important point that isn't obvious from the outset is that reading characters and writing characters are two separate skills. It is much easier to learn to recognize characters and understand them in context than it is to draw them on the page with a pen. It is similar to how you can recognize your mother's face, but you almost certainly couldn't draw it from memory.

The DMT Method only asks you to learn to read. For most people (including most Chinese), the majority of their writing is done with the help of a computer or phone anyway. Those learners who wish to learn to write are advised to do so when they reached an advanced level of ability in the language.

Like with learning vocabulary, there is not much more to learning the characters than memorization.

Just as how words are broken into syllables, characters are broken into components called radicals. Learning the basic radicals (and their meanings, when they even have an independent meaning) will help a lot.

We will again use Anki. Aim to learn 7 new characters per day, with the expectation of remembering about 5 of them.