A-Z 2500 Common Chinese characters List A-Z 2500 Common Chinese characters if you can learn 2500chinese characters you can read most chinese newpaper and can understand most sentence,A foreigner said that he has lived in China for 20 years and knows more than 5000 Chinese characters. Now he can communicate with Chinese people normally, joke with Chinese people, and even quote famous words and phrases. He confidently said that when talking with Chinese people, they could not see that I was a foreigner unless I spoke a foreign language.