Chinese characters with composita in ascending order

[lingohot]

Hello,

Do you know of any list/collection of the most important 3000 or so Chinese characters (hanzi) that comes with example composita (character combinations) for each character that only contain characters that have already appeared in the list/collection?

Example:

1. 一
yi
one

Composita:
一一 (the first character in my imaginary list/collection, so that's the only possible character combination)
yiyi
one by one

2. 天
tian
day

Composita:
一天 (the second character in my imaginary list/collection, so the composita can only contain 一 and 天)
yi tian
one day


3. 明
ming
brightness

Composita:
明天 (the third character in my imaginary list/collection, so the composita can theoretically contain 一 , 天 and 明)
mingtian
tomorrow


And so forth.

[lingohot]

Something like in the screenshot, but where the example word combinations only contain characters that have already been treated before in the list/collection/book (which is unfortunately not the case with the book in the screenshot).

(Screenshot from the book https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Characte ... 9576125200 )

[Wayfarer]

I don't know of one for Chinese (though I'd very like like to), but I do have a book that teaches characters like that for Japanese:

https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Kanji-Kana-Complete-Writing-dp-4805311169/dp/4805311169/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

The compounds given for each character use only characters that have already been taught.

[Axon]

I generated something similar one time. I took a list of Chinese street and storefront signs with the thought experiment: If I started out with no Chinese knowledge, and I walked through China learning every character on every sign I saw, how many signs would I have to walk past before I understood basically everything I was seeing? (The answer was about 1000 signs, for a reasonable definition of "all." Even after 2000 signs, there would still be the occasional unknown character every 20 signs or so.)

This seems like a fairly easy list to come up with. I'm bad about saying I'll do something and then following through, so no promises, but I'll take a look at this and see what I can do.

[Axon]

Update: it was very easy thanks to modern computer science.

I combined three word lists: the full TOCFL vocabulary list, the full HSK 3.0 vocabulary list, and a list published by Hacking Chinese where they manually added important words missing from both official test lists. I converted the whole thing to Traditional Chinese and removed duplicates, resulting in a hefty vocabulary list of 11,407 words (see attachment called hsk-tocfl-expanded.txt). These words contain only 3,098 unique characters, which should provide an excellent starting answer to the question "How many characters do I really need to learn?"

I then used that list to create the composita, working with all 3,098 characters in descending order of frequency. See attachment called chinese-composita.txt. Working down the frequency list, I added all possible example words for each character that used only other characters seen before. If there were none, I just repeated the character itself.

不
不

人
人

子
子

一
一一

大
不大 大人 大大

心
一心

出
出

上
上

有
有人 有心

動
一動不動 出動 動不動 動人

手
一手 人手 出手 動手 手動

下
一下子 上下 下手

無
無不

發
出發 發出 發動

力
人力 動力 大力 心力 有力 無力

生
一生 人生 出生 生動 發生

頭
一頭 上頭 出頭 手頭

來
上來 下來 出來

地
地上 地下 大地

...

This would need to be refined a bit to explain that some words appearing high on this list aren't particularly high-frequency in real life, but it looks like an excellent starting point for an interesting study strategy. Thanks for the idea!

[lingohot]

Update: it was very easy thanks to modern computer science.

Wow, thanks, Axon!!! Will take a more thorough look at the lists later when I have time, looks good!