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.
Chinese characters
Although Chinese characters in Vietnam are now limited to ceremonial uses, they were once in widespread use. Until the early 20th century, Literary Chinese was used in Vietnam for all official and scholarly writing. Around the 13th century the "Nôm" script was developed to record folk literature in the Vietnamese language. The script used Chinese characters to represent both borrowed Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and native words with similar pronunciation or meaning. In addition thousands of new compound characters were created to write Vietnamese words. This process resulted in a highly complex system that was never mastered by more than 5% of the population. Both Literary Chinese and "Nôm" were replaced in the early 20th century by Vietnamese written with the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet.