Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: How many characters are in written Chinese?
Because the majority of modern Chinese words contain more than one character, there are at least two measuring sticks for Chinese literacy: the number of characters known, and the number of words known. John DeFrancis, in the introduction to his Advanced Chinese Reader, estimates that a typical Chinese college graduate recognizes 4,000 to 5,000 characters, and 40,000 to 60,000 words.[3] Jerry Norman, in Chinese, places the number of characters somewhat lower, at 3,000 to 4,000.[4] These counts are complicated by the tangled development of Chinese characters. In many cases, a single character came to be written in multiple ways. This development was restrained to an extent by the standardization of the seal script during the Qin dynasty, but soon started again. Although the Shuowen Jiezi lists 10,516 characters—9,353 of them unique (some of which may already have been out of use by the time it was compiled) plus 1,163 graphic variants—the Jiyun of the Northern Song Dynasty, compiled less than a thousand years later in 1039, contains 53,525 characters, most of them graphic variants.[56]
In addition to strictness in character size and shape, Chinese characters are written with very precise rules. The most important rules regard the strokes employed, stroke placement, and stroke order. Just as each region that uses Chinese characters has standardized character forms, each also has standardized stroke orders, with each standard being different. Most characters can be written with just one correct stroke order, though some words also have many valid stroke orders, which may occasionally result in different stroke counts. Some characters are also written with different stroke orders due to character simplification.
The Zhuang people (an ethnic minority primarily living in Guangxi) are currently written with the character for "zhuang" 壮 "strong; robust", but "Zhuang" was initially transcribed with the character for "tong" 獞 "a dog name", and then with "tong" 僮 ("human" radical) "child; boy servant". The late American sinologist and lexicographer John DeFrancis described how the People's Republic of China removed the graphic pejoration. 
Sometimes the use of one radical or another can have a special significance, as in the case of removing an ethnic slur from the name of the Zhuang minority in southwest China, which used to be written with the dog radical but after 1949 was first written with the human radical and was later changed to a completely different character with the respectable meaning "sturdy": 
 獞 "Zhuàng" (with the dog radical) 
 僮 "Zhuàng" (with the human radical) 
 壮 "Zhuàng" ("sturdy") (1984: 17) 
This 1949 change to "Zhuang" 僮 was made after the Chinese civil war, and the change to "Zhuang" 壮 was made during the 1965 standardization of simplified Chinese characters.
Written Cantonese contains many characters not used in standard written Chinese in order to transcribe words not present in the standard lexicon, and for some words from Old Chinese when their original forms have been forgotten. Despite attempts by the government of Hong Kong in the 1990s to standardize this character set, culminating in the release of the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) for use in electronic communication, there is still significant disagreement about which characters are correct in written Cantonese, as many of the Cantonese words existed as descendants of Old Chinese words, but are being replaced by some new invented Cantonese words due to the Hong Kong Government's lack of knowledge about some of the Cantonese words.
Modern Chinese has many homophones; thus the same spoken syllable may be represented by many characters, depending on meaning. A single character may also have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings; occasionally these correspond to different pronunciations. Cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are generally written with the same character. They typically have similar meanings, but often quite different pronunciations. In other languages, most significantly today in Japanese and sometimes in Korean, characters are used to represent Chinese loanwords, to represent native words independently of the Chinese pronunciation (e.g., kunyomi in Japanese), and as purely phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in the historical variety of Chinese from which they were acquired. These foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese.
Most of the words of Fuzhou dialect stem from Old Chinese and can therefore be written in Chinese characters. Many books published in Qing Dynasty have been written in this traditional way, such as the famous "Mǐndū Biéjì" (, Foochow Romanized: Mìng-dŭ Biék-gé). However, Chinese characters as the writing system for Fuzhou dialect do have many shortcomings.
Written Chinese (Chinese:中文; pinyin:zhōngwén) comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions,[1] or pronunciation.[2] Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: educated Chinese know about 4,000.[3][4] The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese.[5]
Hanja (; ) is the Korean name for Chinese characters (). More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation. "Hanja-mal" or "Hanja-eo" (the latter is more used) refers to words that can be written with Hanja, and "hanmun" (, ) refers to Classical Chinese writing, although "Hanja" is sometimes used loosely to encompass these other concepts. Because Hanja never underwent major reform, they are almost entirely identical to traditional Chinese and "kyūjitai" characters, though the stroke orders for some characters are slightly different. For example, the characters and are written as and . Only a small number of Hanja characters are modified or unique to Korean. By contrast, many of the Chinese characters currently in use in Japan and Mainland China have been simplified, and contain fewer strokes than the corresponding Hanja characters.
The role of Chinese characters in Korean and Vietnamese is much more limited. At one time, many Chinese characters (called hanja) were introduced into Korean for their meaning, just as in Japanese.[14] Today, Korean is written almost exclusively using the Hangul alphabet with a small number of Chinese characters. Each square block character contains Hangul symbols, or letters, that together represent a syllable.[53] Similarly, the use of Chinese and Chinese-styled characters in the Vietnamese chữ nôm script has been almost entirely superseded by the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet.[54] Chinese characters are still actively used in South Korea today, mostly for signs, newspapers, books, and government documents.
In times past, until the 15th century, in Korea, Literary Chinese was the dominant form of written communication prior to the creation of hangul, the Korean alphabet. Much of the vocabulary, especially in the realms of science and sociology, comes directly from Chinese, comparable to Latin or Greek root words in European languages. However, due to the lack of tones in Modern Standard Korean, as the words were imported from Chinese, many dissimilar characters and syllables took on identical pronunciations, and subsequently identical spelling in hangul. Chinese characters are sometimes used to this day for either clarification in a practical manner, or to give a distinguished appearance, as knowledge of Chinese characters is considered by many Koreans a high class attribute and an indispensable part of a classical education. It is also observed that the preference for Chinese characters is treated as being conservative and Confucian.
Chinese is written almost exclusively in Chinese characters. It requires over 3,000 characters for general literacy, but up to 40,000 characters for reasonably complete coverage. Japanese uses fewer characters — general literacy in Japanese can be expected with 1,945 characters. The use of Chinese characters in Korea is becoming increasingly rare, although idiosyncratic use of Chinese characters in proper names requires knowledge (and therefore availability) of many more characters. However, even today, students in South Korea are taught 1,800 characters.
Anecdotal evidence of character amnesia is plentiful, but there has been insufficient scientific study of the phenomenon. There are however a few surveys which reinforce the claim that reliance on input methods has caused those who communicate in written Chinese and Japanese to forget how to write many characters in general use which they previously were able to write from memory. An April 2010 survey conducted by "China Youth Daily" found that of the 2,072 respondents 83 percent reported having trouble writing characters. A similar Dayang Net survey found that 80 percent of respondents acknowledged having forgotten how to write some characters. In 2008 the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China conducted a survey of 3,000 teachers, where sixty percent complained of declining writing ability. Another anecdotal example can be seen during a spelling bee show hosted on CCTV in 2013, where only 30% of participants were able to write "toad" () in Chinese.
Several minority languages of south and southwest China were formerly written with scripts based on Chinese characters but also including many locally created characters.
The most extensive is the "sawndip" script for the Zhuang language of Guangxi which is still used to this day.
Other languages written with such scripts include Miao, Yao, Bouyei, Mulam, Kam, Bai and Hani. All these languages are now written using Latin-based scripts, while Chinese characters are still used for the Mulam language. Even today for Zhuang, according to survey, the traditional sawndip script has twice as many users as the official Latin script.
The Salar do not use any written script for the Salar language, instead using Chinese characters for practical purposes. Salar serves as their spoken language, while Chinese serves them as a both spoken and written language. China offered the Salar an official writing system but it was rejected. The Salars favor the continued use of Chinese characters which shows their "strong attachment to being citizens of the Chinese state". Many of the current generation of Salars are fluent in Chinese.
Writing Hokkien using Chinese characters is a common method of writing in Taiwanese literature. However, there are various problems relating to the use of Chinese characters to write vernacular Hokkien, and in many cases Chinese characters are used alongside other scripts, such as bopomofo or POJ. The problem with using only Chinese characters to write Min Nan is that there are many morphemes (estimated to be around 15 percent of running text) which are not definitively associated with a particular character. Various strategies have been developed to deal with the issue, including researching and reviving the etymologically correct Chinese character from ancient Chinese texts, and classical Chinese, creating new characters, allocating Chinese characters used in written Mandarin with similar meanings, but dissimilar etymology, to represent the missing characters, or using romanization for the "missing 15%".
As an example of how Hanja can help to clear up ambiguity, many homophones are written in Hangul as (sudo), including:Hanja dictionaries ("Jajeon" () or "Okpyeon" ()) are organized by radical (the traditional Chinese method of classifying characters).
In many cases, when writing Hokkien using Chinese characters phonetically, the use of characters is entirely unrelated to the original meaning of the phrase. While most Hokkien morphemes have standard designated characters, they are not always etymologically correct or phono-semantic. Similar-sounding, similar-meaning or rare characters are commonly borrowed or substituted to represent a particular morpheme. In addition, there may be many different ways to write a specific Hokkien phrase using Chinese characters. Wanhua District in Taipei is commonly written as in Chinese (literally "ten thousand flowers"); however, the original meaning of the location name, pronounced "Báng-kah" in Taiwanese Hokkien (old character form ), is a rendering of a non-Chinese indigenous name for "boat". Along with location names, common words also have orthography problems due to non-standardization; "chhit-thô" or "thit-thô" (lit. "play (around)") is commonly written as 𨑨迌; however, neither characters have anything to do with the act of "playing" (the characters mean "near" and "cunning, deceitful"). Within Robert Cheng's publication of a Han character edition of the Taiwanese Hokkien novella ' (lit. "Beloved Enemy") by Lai Jinsheng, the word ', meaning "gangster" and cognate with Vernacular Chinese (), is transcribed as ; these two phonetically-used characters literally translate to "perch-eel".
Another phenomenon that is common in reading Classical Chinese is homophony (words that sound the same). More than 2,500 years of sound change separates Classical Chinese from any modern variety, so when reading Classical Chinese in any modern variety of Chinese (especially Mandarin) or in Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese, many characters which originally had different pronunciations have become homonyms. There is a famous Classical Chinese poem written in the early 20th century by the linguist Chao Yuen Ren called the "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den", which contains only words that are now pronounced , , , and in Mandarin. It was written to show how Classical Chinese has become an impractical language for speakers of modern Chinese because Classical Chinese when spoken aloud is largely incomprehensible. However the poem is perfectly comprehensible when read silently because Literary Chinese, by its very nature as a "written" language using a logographic writing system, can often get away with using homophones that even in spoken Old Chinese would not have been distinguishable in any way.
The following is a list of territorial entities where Chinese is an official language. While those countries or territories that designate Chinese as an official language use the term "Chinese", as Chinese is a group of related language varieties, of which many are not mutually intelligible, in the context of the spoken language such designations are usually understood as designations of specific varieties of Chinese, namely Cantonese, Taiwanese Hakka and Standard Mandarin. In the context of the written language, written modern standard Chinese is usually understood to be the official standard, though different territories use different standard scripts, namely Traditional Chinese characters and Simplified Chinese characters.
It is difficult to establish exactly how many different Chinese characters are in use today; the new HSK, a widely used proficiency test for Standard Chinese as a second language, tests over 2,600 different characters, whilst in 1988 the People's Republic of China published the "List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese" which contains 7,000 different characters. In Japan, where a smaller set of characters are in general usage, the Japanese Ministry of Education prescribes the teaching of 2,136 kanji in primary and secondary school in a list called the jōyō kanji, meaning "regular-use Chinese characters".
In Singapore, simplified Chinese characters are the official standard used in all official publications as well as the government-controlled press. While simplified Chinese characters are taught exclusively in schools, the government does not officially discourage the use of traditional characters. Therefore, many shop signs continue to be written in traditional characters. Menus in hawker centres and coffeeshops are also usually written in simplified characters.
Various current Chinese characters have been traced back to the late Shang Dynasty about 1200–1050 BC,[6][7][8] but the process of creating characters is thought to have begun some centuries earlier.[9] After a period of variation and evolution, Chinese characters were standardized under the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC).[10] Over the millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy.[11] As the varieties of Chinese diverged, a situation of diglossia developed, with speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties able to communicate through writing using Classical Chinese.[12] In the early 20th century, Classical Chinese was replaced in this role by written vernacular Chinese, corresponding to the standard spoken language ("Mandarin"). Although most other varieties of Chinese are not written, there are traditions of written Cantonese, written Shanghainese and written Hokkien, among others.
Traditional Chinese characters are only still used primarily by those in Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong and many overseas communities, comprising a small minority of the Chinese-speaking population (~50 million people). However, they also remain in use in mainland China for artistic, scholarly and advertising purposes. Simplified Chinese has come to dominate the written form of Chinese used nearly all over the world, due to the size and rising influence of mainland China. The United Nations has also used simplified Chinese since 1973. Moving back to traditional characters on the mainland has the potential to be difficult, confusing, and time-consuming.The long history of Chinese characters and the role of the Chinese Communist Party in the design and adoption of simplified characters means that there is often a strong political aspect to the debate on the usage of traditional and simplified Chinese characters.
In recent years, the official Campaign of Simplification of Chinese Language has caused many controversial discussions in the general public to higher level of the government in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and amongst some international organisations.
Until the early 20th century, Literary Chinese was the written language of government and scholarship in Vietnam. Popular literature in Vietnamese was written in the "chữ Nôm" script, consisting of borrowed Chinese characters together with many characters created locally. By the end of the 1920s, both scripts had been replaced by writing in Vietnamese using the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet.
There are two standardised forms of the language, namely Putonghua in Mainland China and Guoyu in Taiwan. Aside from a number of differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, Putonghua is written using simplified Chinese characters (plus Hanyu Pinyin romanization for teaching), and Guoyu is written using traditional Chinese characters (plus Zhuyin for teaching). Many characters are identical between the two systems.