Character amnesia
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".
Written Chinese
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. 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. Similarly, the use of Chinese and Chinese-styled characters in the Vietnamese chữ nôm script has been almost entirely superseded by the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet. Chinese characters are still actively used in South Korea today, mostly for signs, newspapers, books, and government documents.