How many Chinese characters should I learn?

There are over 80,000 Chinese characters, but most of them are seldom used today. So how many Chinese characters do you need to know? For basic reading and writing of modern Chinese, you only need a few thousands. Here are the coverage rates of the most frequently used Chinese characters:

Most frequently used 1,000 characters: ~90% (Coverage rate)
Most frequently used 2,500 characters: 98.0% (Coverage rate)
Most frequently used 3,500 characters: 99.5% (Coverage rate)

Easy Chinese character card provides 3,000 most frequently used Chinese characters, 6,000 example sentence, 13,000 most frequently used words.

Once learned those most important Chinese characters You'll be able to read and understand about 99% of virtually everything you find in Chinese!