History of education
Although there are more than 40,000 Chinese characters in written Chinese, many are rarely used. Studies have shown that full literacy in the Chinese language requires a knowledge of only between three and four thousand characters.
General Chinese
Taking a telegraphic code-book of about 10,000 characters as a representative list of characters in modern use, Chao notes that General Chinese results in a reduction of 80% in the number of characters needing to be learned.