So according to Skritter I know how to write 600+ characters, but I only know how to write 450+ words. I'm just a bit confused, because i'm sure some of those characters, if not most of them would count as words.

So is the amount of words I know roughly characters + words or how does it work?

On here a combination of 2 characters is a word and an individual character is a character, even though it could be a word by itself.

It's difficult to quantify which characters are words, because some characters are dropped in text and the word is implied based on the context.

For example, 自己 and 感觉 could be combined into 自觉. The first one meaning oneself and the second feeling, but when you put them together it has the meaning of self-aware. That makes it much more difficult to determine which characters are actually being used as abbreviated forms of words.

@bjnsharp

Does that mean then that I know roughly 1000 words? Assuming that all the characters aren't just radicals that wouldn't be used on their own.

@josh

I see, so 自觉 is actually 自己感觉？ I understand it's difficult to quantify it, so was just wondering how it actually works so i can get a better approximation for the amount of words I know. I assume I can't know less words than I know characters as i've definitely studied a fair amount of words as well so if characters + words is roughly how many words you know, that would make sense.

I would guess your word count would be characters and words combined, minus a small amount, to take in to account the radicals as you mentioned and also individual characters that have no real meaning, there is probably some duplications and slang or abbreviations but roughly characters and words combined would be the words you know. There are quite a lot of "words" in skritter which are not really words but short phrases, so depending on what you learn.

Just drop the habit of thinking in terms of "words". Chinese is more sophisticated than this.

Thanks for the advice. But we all have our ways of improving faster. If it helps some, what's the harm? I know we can't be fluent just by memorising 3000 words, but it helps to make progress day by day.

Besides, for my Chinese class, they even asked me how many words I knew and each course mentions how many additional words you'll learn after completing it :)

jlau, (I think) it only counts words based on what's added in your lists. Since I also add the parts of multi-character words, my Word count is higher than my characters...
But if you don't, then it only counts the words you actually add.