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.
Written Chinese
The role of Chinese characters in Korean and Vietnamese is much more limited. At one time, many Chinese characters (called hanja) were introduced into Korean for their meaning, just as in Japanese. Today, Korean is written almost exclusively using the Hangul alphabet with a small number of Chinese characters. Each square block character contains Hangul symbols, or letters, that together represent a syllable. Similarly, the use of Chinese and Chinese-styled characters in the Vietnamese chữ nôm script has been almost entirely superseded by the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet. Chinese characters are still actively used in South Korea today, mostly for signs, newspapers, books, and government documents.