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 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.