It really makes me wonder--how many words will be "enough" words? Or when will I stop consulting with a dictionary so regularly? In my own native language, I rarely ever look up words. I usually just ignore them, have a vague sense of what they might mean, etc., and I continue on, undeterred. Sometimes, they fit into broad categories. When I look at a list of words like, "Jurassic, Triassic, Devonian, Cambrian, Paleozoic, Cenozoic, Silurian," etc., I just say to myself, "Oh, those are geologic ages." I don't know much beyond that, but that's fine. Or "captain, corporal, general, lieutenant, colonel, sergeant, private, chief petty officer," etc. I really don't know all the details of each ranking, but I know that they are military rankings, after all, and that's enough for me. Same with "ruby, topaz, amethyst, carnelian, onyx, sapphire, agate," etc. Okay, I don't know the specific details, but I do know that those are kinds of precious stones.

There's a sort of odd psychological effect that takes place when I learn Chinese--I feel compelled to learn all the words, probably even beyond what a native Chinese person would do. Even my Chinese friend says, "Oh, I don't know what that word means either. I just know it's a kind of stone" (i.e., like the example above). I'm in "study" mode, and if I fail to recognize any given word (even a word that many Chinese people don't know), I count it as a gap in my knowledge and feel like I have to actively learn it.

I wish I could remember who, but somebody on this site (maybe even you--I'm not sure) left this wonderful link, which I have saved in my favorites: https://puroh.it/how-many-chinese-characters-and-words-are-in-use/

This person lays out his method of counting, and he comes up with a total vocabulary size of a little more than 26,000 words, with about 21,000 words getting you to 99.9% comprehension (if there are 500 words on the average page of a book, I suppose that adds up to 1 unknown word on every 2 pages).
 

I wish you the best on your professional goals. 加油！

8 hours ago, Woodford said:

"Jurassic, Triassic, Devonian, Cambrian, Paleozoic, Cenozoic, Silurian," etc., I just say to myself, "Oh, those are geologic ages."

I think you underestimate yourself - you'd definitely do the same in Chinese based on context and/or a list with compounds ending 纪 or 代 (plus with a lot of these kinds of scientific terms coming in from the English-led scientific community, many loans are easy to guess on the spot with context - one that comes to mind is something like 伽马 which came up the other week in some reading).

That link wasn't from me, but I have seen his website before. I can't help but think it somehow grossly under-represents the actual situation from experience. 3500+ characters would seem like the threshold moment from many including myself here on CF, and even then that would seem more like a 98% comprehension rate (that number is entirely based on subjective feeling on my part). As for the word list, I'm still wondering how, with "9,786,524,890 1-grams across a total of 94,933 books" analysed, words like 洗脑 and 南辕北辙 turn up in the least frequent list...am I missing something here?

From experience, I would say rough, round figures below would set you up well for professional Chinese competency:

20-25,000 common words

5-10,000 specialist field words

4-5000 characters

Of course, thats all very well when we really have no way of knowing how much we know or how to even properly count, but its always nice to have a rough idea! Thanks for the encouragement, good luck with your goals too!

Hi @Tomsima, I'm curious how you count how much vocab you have, or how you worked out the "20k general vocab“ number. Any insights?

I didn't so much work it out as I just kept a running flashcard deck, adding a new word any time I came across one. I'm not super consistent with it these days, but here's a screenshot of my 'general deck'. Quite enjoying the fact that the very first word I added was 得瑟 way back in 2015 - I've definitely learned to be a little more modest since then! As you can see, my general deck has 21,311 entries in it, which is where I got my number from

On 4/10/2025 at 8:27 PM, Tomsima said:

I didn't so much work it out as I just kept a running flashcard deck, adding a new word any time I came across one. I'm not super consistent with it these days, but here's a screenshot of my 'general deck'. Quite enjoying the fact that the very first word I added was 得瑟 way back in 2015 - I've definitely learned to be a little more modest since then! As you can see, my general deck has 21,311 entries in it, which is where I got my number from

Nice! I wish I had maintained a deck like this from the very beginning. Unfortunately I didn't really start using flashcards seriously till 5+ years in to my journey.

I started learning Chinese 7 years before then, so the deck actually started from me importing a list of the base 5000 words from HSK1-6 and it just grew from there.