BEIJING, May 23 (Xinhua) -- Chinese is not difficult to learn, for people could understand 90 percent of the content in Chinese publications, so long as they learn only about 900 Chinese characters and 11,000 phrases, a new survey shows.

    Though 1.65 million words are found in use in the files, only 110,000, or seven percent, are frequently used. The rest are mainly names of people, places and organizations, according to the survey made by the Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission on the current situation of Chinese language.

    The survey is based on 900 million characters in more than 8.9 million text files chosen from newspapers, magazines, TV stations and the Internet.

    "That means Chinese is not that difficult to learn," said Li Yuming, director of the language information administration department of the Ministry of Education.

    The survey report, the first of its kind issued in China, also shows that a large number of characters, which were rarely used in the past, now appear more often in publications.

    Among the first 7,000 characters ranked according to frequency of usage in the research, about 615 are not in the existing 7,000-character table of the standard Chinese that were made nearly 20 years ago.

    Among the words used on Internet, more than 55 percent are symbols or letters, exceeding Chinese characters, according to the survey.

    The survey also shows that many of the 100 languages used by various ethnic minorities of China are at the brink of extinction.     

    Because of rapid social development and the emergence of new media formats, such as the Internet, the Chinese language is witnessing a fast development, maybe faster than it has ever had, Li said.

    Obviously, the current character table has lagged behind the development, and the ministry is drafting a new one, Li said, adding that the research may serve as an important reference to the revision. Enditem