A Little out of topic

[Saiyan]

I have a small doubt that is a little off topic. someone suggested that i learn 3000 kanji to get the basic knowledge of reading everyday japanese. my doubt is, will i be able to read everyday chinese with this knowledge?

[Belton]

I read yesterday on this site http://www.zhongwen.com/ that in Taiwan 4000 are considered sufficient and 3000 in China. But 6000 is also mentioned as being how many an educated person might recognise.

3000 seems a little bit on the high side for Japanese. If you discount names, high brow literature and specialist areas, I'd say the 1945 jyouyou kanji would be sufficient for most needs. And you could probably read quite a bit with less.

Bear in mind that some identical characters can have different meanings in China and Japan. Also the way characters are written and have been simplified has diverged between China and Japan.
Not knowing any Chinese myself, I would guess you could "extract meaning" rather than "read" with a knowledge of written Japanese. You'd still have to learn Chinese.

[Saiyan]

thanks. i've asked this before but i think this time the question should be more specific. with 1945 kanji, will i be able to read novels in japanese?

[Psy]

This touches upon a well established myth about learning kanji. The truth of the matter is this: If you don't know sufficient vocabulary and have a grasp of proper usage/nuance, you won't be able to understand things no matter how many characters you've studied. Knowing the kanji equates to a command of the alphabet and word roots, but not an overall command of the language. For that, your only option is sustained practice and dedication.

As for the characters you'll actually run into in written works-- it depends on the author and targeted audience. However, I've noticed that the average adult-level novel contains a good number of characters that sit outside the jouyou list. You can, of course, continue your study of kanji by focusing your efforts on lists, but I feel that once you've learned around 2,000 characters, you'll have reached the point where you can start picking them up on a case-by-case basis.

[Javizy]

The jouyou set does seem a bit insufficient, but you'll know such a large percentage after learning it that, like Psy said, you can leave learning them until you encounter them. What you should focus on is learning to recognise the individual parts that make up characters, so a book that teaches you in this fashion, rather than just repeatedly writing out the characters as a whole, will benefit you greatly. I've learned a number of nonstandard characters literally just by looking at them because I know the parts they are comprised of, and can easily make a Heisig mnemonic. Good luck either way.