Yanmei Zhang, Yu Tian, Zhan Lv, Jiali Chi, Zixin Lin, Mengyuan He, Shuang Ye, Chengya Zhang, Nuo Zhang, Xin Ruan

Zhan Lv

28 December 2023

Character frequency, Character types, Sight characters, Traditional characters, Variant characters.

This paper adopts the research methods of corpus linguistics and metrological linguistics, obtains a massive corpus, and builds a corpus by using Python crawler technology to carry out a systematic and comprehensive, large-scale statistical study on the frequency of modern Chinese characters. On this basis, it will reveal the frequency gradient of the current Chinese characters, the number and specific types of commonly used characters, and the number, type, and order of the basic Chinese teaching material and international Chinese education materials, providing a reference. A survey on the irregular use of characters was also conducted, which mainly investigated the irregular use of traditional characters and characters in different forms. The survey reveals: 1. the number of commonly used modern Chinese characters needs to be simplified; 2. the specific character types in the list of commonly used modern Chinese characters need to be updated; 3. the awareness of the standardization of traditional and variant characters needs to be strengthened. On this basis, this study argues that the current direction of Chinese character reform is not pinyinization, but rather simplifying Chinese characters (while giving better play to the role of Pinyin) and standardizing their use.

© 2023, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license