musicislife73

I've taken 3 semesters of Chinese at a local community college and plan to take the AP next year. I'm currently enrolled in Chinese 4 for the summer and was wondering what a good number of characters to know would be. I've heard 2500 is good, but that seems like it would require fluency, which doesn't seem accurate based on other AP Languages (I took AP Spanish Language as a non-native speaker this year and got a 5, although I am nowhere near fluent). What would any of you who have taken the exam recommend?

musicislife73

I've also been thinking, does this account for compound words formed by 2+ characters? Also, BUMP...

garfieldliker

You probably should know over 9000 characters...

musicislife73

I'll consider that undertaking But seriously, if anyone has taken it, what would you recommend?

EveningSwan

I plan on taking the exam this year since I am Asian and I can read a little bit of Chinese. Theoretically, to read a newspaper, you should know ~3000 characters, but I looked at a released exam and I got the basic gist of what they wrote with my knowledge of only ~500 characters. lol

SleepingAway

First off: Best of Luck!!!

For me, my mom taught me grades K-5 (actually 7 but by then....) from texts that they use in China (countless years of pain and torture, blood and tears) and I did get a 5 on the exam (took it this year)

Character Quantity: 10,000 (?)

Now I over-answer ur question
exam rundown:

*know the format! I barely read the book since I was cramming for AP Env. self-studying it over 2 weeks but I still remembered the format of the test perfectly
*be culturally-apropriate, I remembered 5 cultural stories the day of the test and used none of them, just incoporate culture into your speaking parts (Ex. be humble in your language use)
*memorize a few idioms and go all out crazy to incorporate them (I incorporated one in the writing)

Text: get a Chinese text, at least 3rd grade (paper back, real cheap, not very thick, and you might be able to find it on amazon, get ones w/out English in them... at all) and Barron's review guide (very thorough but focus on the authentic Chinese text, parts of the Barron's text is hard to fit together since it just gives you lists of characters to memorize)

Practice: DEFINITELY do the practice exams (Easily found via google) and familizarize yourself with the exam (I practiced the day before and the listening, even for me, was *hard* since it was soooo fast and you barely had time to think)

My results: like I mentioned above, I got a 5 (and by the time I took it, my Chinese knowledge probly went down to 3rd grade level) and so did my friends who took it
(5 people all got 5s including me, but the other 4 were "native speakers")

Once again: good luck! the curve isn't horrible so relax, and do well!