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 family of scripts
Each character of the early script represents a word of Old Chinese, which at that time was uniformly monosyllabic. The strategies used are traditionally classified into six categories (六書 "liùshū" "six writings") first recorded in the second century dictionary "Shuowen Jiezi". Three of these categories involved a representation of the meaning of the word:
Evolved forms of these characters are still in among the most commonly used today.