I've always enjoyed this forum post from YesJapan (japanese learning site), not exactly Chinese but maybe directionally applicable.

http://yesjapan.com/YJ6/question/1394/how-many-kanji-does-on...

Highlights:

> 100 kanji - basic signs

> 500 kanji - 50% of printed material

> 1000 kanji - 85% of printed material

> 1945 kanji - 97% of printed material

> 8000 kanji - 100% of anything japanese kanji in electronic form (still only about 99.99% in printed material as a lot of ancient texts have some pretty obscure one time only kanji).

> Learning kanji is uber important in increasing your ability to communicate effictively in Japanese. What [YesJapan] does, and does well, is give users an excellent base of Japanese from which to work from. With a base of about 2000 vocabulary words and enough grammar to get by in most situations, the kanji comes secondary as they will then help to start bridge the gaps between the beginner/intermediate level and the advanced/fluent level.

> As far as learning speed goes, there is a fast assimilation of the first 100 kanji. After that, the learning pace levels off to a slow progression until around the 800-1000 kanji point when the pattern recognition starts to kick in, then past 1200 the pace picks back up again until around 2400-3000 where the pace levels off again because at this point the literacy level is of that of a graduate student, and only obscure or rarely used kanji are available for further study. You can judge your kanji learning speed through the first 100 kanji benchmark. It takes one unit of time to learn the first 100 kanji, then about 14-30 units of time to learn the 800-1000, and then another 7-15 units of time to finish off the joyou list (and name kanji). So if it took you 1 month to learn your first 100 kanji it should take you another year to 3 years to learn your next 1000, and then another half a year to a year and a half to finish the list. Again, faster learners will find themselves closer to the earlier stages of the spectrum, while casual learners and slower learners towards the further end of the spectrum.

> Another nice benchmark to keep in mind when studying Japanese is that going from a western to asian language (meaning no prior fluency in an asian language) takes 88 weeks (5 hours a day study) or 2200 hours of study to go from 0 to complete fluency. 44 weeks, or about a year of intensive study should put you at around the JLPT 3-2 level, and another 44 weeks to put you at the JLPT 1 level. Again this is assuming 5 hour a day of dedicated language study, so if your study time is less then that, you can plan your progression accordingly. One of the benefits of living in country is that the 5 hours comes a lot easier and quicker then living outside the target country where the material has to be self or externally generated.

> In case you were wondering - western languages to other western languages take about 22 weeks (550 hours of intensive study), non-western/non-asian languages 44 weeks (1100 hours of intensive study) and asian languages [88 weeks] (2200 hours of intensive study). The other benefit of learning a language in one of the other two language families is that if you decide to learn another language in the same language family (region 1 2 or 3 as described above) it takes only 22 weeks of study.

> Which brings about another intersting topic. Korean takes about 52 weeks of intensive study to master from a western language (because their writing is mainly hangul, the necessity to learn a complicated script is lessened, thus easier to learn then chinese or Japanese). Thus learning Korean first, followed by Japanes will only take 74 weeks of study, vs 110 weeks of study going to Japanese first then Korean.