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.
Chinese characters
Modified radicals and new variants are two common reasons for the ever-increasing number of characters. There are about 300 radicals and 100 are in common use. Creating a new character by modifying the radical is an easy way to disambiguate homographs among "xíngshēngzì" pictophonetic compounds. This practice began long before the standardization of Chinese script by Qin Shi Huang and continues to the present day. The traditional 3rd-person pronoun "tā" ( "he, she, it"), which is written with the "person radical", illustrates modifying significs to form new characters. In modern usage, there is a graphic distinction between "tā" ( "she") with the "woman radical", "tā" ( "it") with the "animal radical", "tā" ( "it") with the "roof radical", and "tā" ( "He") with the "deity radical", One consequence of modifying radicals is the fossilization of rare and obscure variant logographs, some of which are not even used in Classical Chinese. For instance, "he" "harmony, peace", which combines the "grain radical" with the "mouth radical", has infrequent variants with the radicals reversed and with the "flute radical".