<p>I made an effort to summarise available information about character and word frequencies for learners and teachers a while back and came up with the following which are relevant for traditional characters.</p>

<ol>
<li><a href="http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/sorted.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Chih-hao Tsai has a list of well over 13 000 characters</a>, described as follows: "The corpus consists of all the BIG-5 Chinese characters appeared on Usenet newsgroups during 1993-1994. It consists of 171,882,493 characters. This is perhaps by far the largest Chinese corpus in the world." More info <a href="http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>.</li>
<li>The following list is also linked to on that page, referring to <a href="http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/94charfreq.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">frequency data from Shih-Kun Huang</a>. Maybe both lists are based on the same data; I'm not sure. </li>
<li>I don't know about any downloadable corpora for traditional Chinese, but I have mainly relied on <a href="http://asbc.iis.sinica.edu.tw/index_readme.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese</a>, which is also tokenised, although I don't know if there's any frequency data based on that corpus.</li>
<li>The Taiwan MoE offers a frequency lists that is available for free, based on mixed sources totalling around two million characters. You can get it <a href="https://language.moe.gov.tw/001/Upload/files/SITE_CONTENT/M0001/PIN/biau1.htm?open" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>, but you have to download and run an executable file in Windows (but why?). It does work, though. Info about the samples used can be found <a href="https://language.moe.gov.tw/001/Upload/files/SITE_CONTENT/M0001/PIN/yu3.htm?open" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>. The sources are not as new as one would wish, but they are more balanced than online Usenet newsgroups at least.</li>
</ol>

<p>I summarised all the resources I found for both simplified and traditional Chinese, for both character components, characters and words here, in case anyone is interested: <a href="https://www.hackingchinese.com/the-most-common-chinese-words-characters-and-components-for-language-learners-and-teachers/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">The most common Chinese words, characters and components for language learners and teachers</a></p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-02-05T10:43:18.753Z
Hey Olle, thanks for your response and I really dig your website which I've read a lot of articles from in the course of studying Mandarin. However I must admit that the resources you named are both included in the ones I presented and don't work for me for the reasons described in my question.
Konstantin H.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-02-05T10:52:53.643Z
Sorry about that, I somehow didin't realise that it was the same resource. There should be newer sources, I'll have a closer look and I'll update the answer if I find anything.
Olle Linge
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-02-06T06:23:41.820Z
Awesome, thanks a lot! I did spend a lot of time searching in English and Chinese and couldn't find anything, so I appreciate your time. Good luck!
Konstantin H.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-02-21T18:56:43.820Z
@KonstantinH. I have updated my answer with the only additional resource I could find after spending quite a lot of time looking and asking a few people. I don't think there are any more sources freely available. I guess it would be possible to search the Academia Sinica corpus character for character (it gives frequencies at the top), but doing this manually is out of the question, of course.
Olle Linge
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-02-24T06:19:46.480Z
Thanks a lot of the effort! I had actually come across this one but didn't take a closer look because I don't have a Windows PC ...
Konstantin H.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-02-24T08:32:12.767Z
I don't either, but managed to extract it in an emulator. Should be quite easy to get a friend to do, though, it just spits out a text file.
Olle Linge
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-02-04T15:32:40.687Z
2020-02-21T18:51:58.110Z
2020-02-21T18:51:58.110Z
Olle Linge
<p>I am looking to do the (seemingly simple) task of creating a simple frequency table for traditional Chinese characters (not words). I'm encountering the following problems:</p>

<ol>
<li>Most resources are in simplified Chinese, such as all of <a href="https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/3/character-and-word-frequencies">these</a>.</li>
<li>Traditional Chinese resources are either too small (like <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;pid=sites&amp;srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnx0bWRzaGFyZXxneDozN2U1NDk5ODUxN2I5MTVh" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this one</a> which also has some weird non-identifiable characters such as #2959) or too old (like <a href="http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/sorted.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this one</a> from 1993–1994 which also has 資 in 11th place which I think is very strange, even though it's very large (13000+ chars).</li>
<li>I have also tried to find Traditional Chinese corpora in a usable format to calculate the frequency myself (which is obviously barely any effort), but all corpora I could find where either <a href="http://www.aclclp.org.tw/corp_c.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">paid</a> or not accessible/downloadable like <a href="http://asbc.iis.sinica.edu.tw/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a> and <a href="https://www.sketchengine.eu/zhtenten-chinese-corpus/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a>. I also downloaded the <em>zhwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2</em> from <a href="https://dumps.wikimedia.org/zhwiki/latest/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a> to use Wikipedia as a resource but it mixes simplified and traditional and I couldn't find any way of only getting the traditional Chinese Wikipedia articles.</li>
</ol>

<p>I am surprised at how difficult it is to find any of the resources I'm looking for. If you know of any accessible Mandarin corpus with traditional characters (nothing fancy, don't need any parsing, tagging, tokenizing or other annotation, just pure text) or how to quickly build one, feel free to share! Thanks in advance.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-02-04T03:13:34.857Z
The entire Chinese wikipedia is in Mandarin using traditional characters, perhaps you can crawl it? EDIT: Nevermind, apparently you say it is not. Look for Taiwanese resources would be a place where I would start.
Marko
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-02-04T12:07:03.033Z
Building the corpus on my own does sound fun (no sarcasm), but the effort is totally not worth it since it's for a small project only. If this is the only way, then I might as well just take the 1993–1994 one which is probably still the best out of the ones I mentioned in the question.
Konstantin H.
<characters><traditional-characters><taiwan>
Can't find suitable resource for character frequencies for traditional Chinese (Mandarin)
# Can't find suitable resource for character frequencies for traditional Chinese (Mandarin)

(Asked by: username_0 on 2020-02-03)

I am looking to do the (seemingly simple) task of creating a simple frequency table for traditional Chinese characters (not words). I'm encountering the following problems:

1. Most resources are in simplified Chinese, such as all of [these](https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/3/character-and-word-frequencies).
2. Traditional Chinese resources are either too small (like [this one](https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnx0bWRzaGFyZXxneDozN2U1NDk5ODUxN2I5MTVh) which also has some weird non-identifiable characters such as #2959) or too old (like [this one](http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/sorted.html) from 1993–1994 which also has 資 in 11th place which I think is very strange, even though it's very large (13000+ chars).
3. I have also tried to find Traditional Chinese corpora in a usable format to calculate the frequency myself (which is obviously barely any effort), but all corpora I could find where either [paid](http://www.aclclp.org.tw/corp_c.php) or not accessible/downloadable like [this](http://asbc.iis.sinica.edu.tw/) and [this](https://www.sketchengine.eu/zhtenten-chinese-corpus/). I also downloaded the *zhwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2* from [here](https://dumps.wikimedia.org/zhwiki/latest/) to use Wikipedia as a resource but it mixes simplified and traditional and I couldn't find any way of only getting the traditional Chinese Wikipedia articles.

I am surprised at how difficult it is to find any of the resources I'm looking for. If you know of any accessible Mandarin corpus with traditional characters (nothing fancy, don't need any parsing, tagging, tokenizing or other annotation, just pure text) or how to quickly build one, feel free to share! Thanks in advance.

**Tags:** characters, traditional-characters, taiwan

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: The entire Chinese wikipedia is in Mandarin using traditional characters, perhaps you can crawl it? EDIT: Nevermind, apparently you say it is not. Look for Taiwanese resources would be a place where I would start.  
> **username_0**: Building the corpus on my own does sound fun (no sarcasm), but the effort is totally not worth it since it's for a small project only. If this is the only way, then I might as well just take the 1993–1994 one which is probably still the best out of the ones I mentioned in the question.  

---

## 1 answers

### Answer by username_2 on 2020-02-04. Score: 5

I made an effort to summarise available information about character and word frequencies for learners and teachers a while back and came up with the following which are relevant for traditional characters.

1. [Chih-hao Tsai has a list of well over 13 000 characters](http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/sorted.html), described as follows: "The corpus consists of all the BIG-5 Chinese characters appeared on Usenet newsgroups during 1993-1994. It consists of 171,882,493 characters. This is perhaps by far the largest Chinese corpus in the world." More info [here](http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/).
2. The following list is also linked to on that page, referring to [frequency data from Shih-Kun Huang](http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/94charfreq.html). Maybe both lists are based on the same data; I'm not sure.
3. I don't know about any downloadable corpora for traditional Chinese, but I have mainly relied on [Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese](http://asbc.iis.sinica.edu.tw/index_readme.htm), which is also tokenised, although I don't know if there's any frequency data based on that corpus.
4. The Taiwan MoE offers a frequency lists that is available for free, based on mixed sources totalling around two million characters. You can get it [here](https://language.moe.gov.tw/001/Upload/files/SITE_CONTENT/M0001/PIN/biau1.htm?open), but you have to download and run an executable file in Windows (but why?). It does work, though. Info about the samples used can be found [here](https://language.moe.gov.tw/001/Upload/files/SITE_CONTENT/M0001/PIN/yu3.htm?open). The sources are not as new as one would wish, but they are more balanced than online Usenet newsgroups at least.

I summarised all the resources I found for both simplified and traditional Chinese, for both character components, characters and words here, in case anyone is interested: [The most common Chinese words, characters and components for language learners and teachers](https://www.hackingchinese.com/the-most-common-chinese-words-characters-and-components-for-language-learners-and-teachers/)

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Hey username_2, thanks for your response and I really dig your website which I've read a lot of articles from in the course of studying Mandarin. However I must admit that the resources you named are both included in the ones I presented and don't work for me for the reasons described in my question.  
> **username_2**: Sorry about that, I somehow didin't realise that it was the same resource. There should be newer sources, I'll have a closer look and I'll update the answer if I find anything.  
> **username_0**: Awesome, thanks a lot! I did spend a lot of time searching in English and Chinese and couldn't find anything, so I appreciate your time. Good luck!  
> **username_2**: @KonstantinH. I have updated my answer with the only additional resource I could find after spending quite a lot of time looking and asking a few people. I don't think there are any more sources freely available. I guess it would be possible to search the Academia Sinica corpus character for character (it gives frequencies at the top), but doing this manually is out of the question, of course.  
> **username_0**: Thanks a lot of the effort! I had actually come across this one but didn't take a closer look because I don't have a Windows PC ...  
> **username_2**: I don't either, but managed to extract it in an emulator. Should be quite easy to get a friend to do, though, it just spits out a text file.  

---

