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
Modern Chinese has many homophones; thus the same spoken syllable may be represented by many characters, depending on meaning. A single character may also have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings; occasionally these correspond to different pronunciations. Cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are generally written with the same character. They typically have similar meanings, but often quite different pronunciations. In other languages, most significantly today in Japanese and sometimes in Korean, characters are used to represent Chinese loanwords, to represent native words independently of the Chinese pronunciation (e.g., kunyomi in Japanese), and as purely phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in the historical variety of Chinese from which they were acquired. These foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese.