What are the most common Chinese characters? A Taiwanese linguistic researcher answers the question. Chih-Hao Tsai performed a study that assessed the frequency and stroke counts of Chinese characters that appeared in Usenet newsgroups during 1993 and 1994. The result is a collection of 4000 of the most frequenty used characters organized into sets of 200 by the "Learn Chinese Online" website.
According to the authors of Learn Chinese Online, knowing just 1000 characters will allow you to understand 90% of written communication, and if you know all 4000 characters in the list, you can understand just about anything. I'm not sure about that, but I really only know between 100 and 200, so there's a long way to go. However, I was able to identify more than half of the characters in the first set of 200, as well as a few characters in the next 2 sets. Of course, knowing the characters only gets you so far. You need to know the grammar as well.
The character frequency study was originally done in 1996. It is based on a count of the characters that appeared as encoded by the BIG5 encoding system, which I now know is the encoding system used for traditional characters. The study not only looked at the character frequencies but also the stroke counts for those characters. Since the sample is drawn from Usenet groups, I wonder how applicable this frequency count is to normal speach or to common printed materials like a newspaper or a website. However, it's a good place to start becoming familiar with characters and guaging how much I've learned.
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