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. Jerry Norman, in "Chinese", places the number of characters somewhat lower, at 3,000 to 4,000. 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.
Chinaknowledge
With 1.5 billion speakers, the Chinese language is the most spoken language of the world. It is nevertheless one single language that is spoken in the same form in all parts of China, nor has it been unchanged over time. The script by which the Chinese language is written is an ideographic script embedded into clouds of mystery. It is an obstacle for education and literacy and has nevertheless been used for a vast treasury of literature. And it has provided an example for the scripts of neighbouring states. This part of the encyclopedia provides an introduction into important aspects of both the Chinese language and the Chinese script.