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.
Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage
A team of scholars at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Research Centre for Humanities Computing developed a free web edition of "Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage" and published it online in 1999. The web edition comprises a total of 8,169 head characters, 40,379 entries of Chinese words or phrases, and 44,407 explanatory entries of grammatical usage. Chinese character encoding is in the Big5 system (which includes 13,053 traditional Chinese characters), which does not encode simplified Chinese characters or uncommon characters (represented as "□" in the dictionary) included in Unicode's 80,388 CJK Unified Ideographs. The web edition dictionary replaces Lin Yutang's obsolete Gwoyeu Romatzyh system with modern standard pinyin romanization, which users can hear pronounced through speech synthesis. It also abandons Lin's obsolete Instant Index System, which "has not been widely used since its inception", and provides three machine-generated indexes by radical, pinyin, and English.