CJK characters
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.
Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese
The "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" comprises approximately 5,000 single-character head entries, collated by radical-and-stroke and numbered according to the 214 Kangxi radicals. The twelve most frequent radicals are given at the bottom of the pages for the dictionary user to memorize. "To insure further the finding of the characters, the authors have entered each character under all its apparently possible radicals and made a cross reference to the main entry" (1947: xxvi). For instance, 魯 "luu" is entered under radical 72 曰 "sun", with the note "See Rad. 195 魚 ["fish"]." The "Concise Dictionary" includes the popular and cursive forms of many characters, as well as the Suzhou numerals (e.g., "〢 "ell" Soochow numeral for '2', used in trade"), and the Bopomofo symbols ("ㄎ "ke" National Phonetic letter for the aspirated initial "k""), which had never been included in a Chinese dictionary, thus removing "one source of bewilderment for the foreign student of Chinese" (Luo 1947: 434).