[nwinter]

Yes, I'm probably the fastest on paper because I avoid some of the quirks with the time tracking system. Our top normal user hit 2000 characters essentially from writing scratch (had some reading knowledge) in 100 hours, but now he's at 2200 characters / 180 hours because of some crazy quest to hit 98% retention or some such.

6000 characters is very extreme. I think 3000 is a more magic target.

I expect we can produce some very sexy stats, once we build a data analysis framework for it. Do you think we could publish just based on our online practice data, without doing a more traditional study?

[rms]

Ah, right, I couldn't remember what the level for basic fluency was.

As for publication, I'm really not sure. I think it would depend on you finding someone else's data for Chinese language learning for comparison purposes. There's probably some conference somewhere you can present at, if nothing else.

[girk]

The level for basical fluency is 800 characters. Research done has shown that by knowing these 800 characters (which have been specifically determined) will allow you to read 80% of all Chinese ever written.