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.
List of longest novels
A particular difficulty is created when comparing word counts across different writing systems. The logographic Chinese characters used to write East Asian languages each represent one "morpheme" and are not separated by spaces. The same character may at times stand for one word, and other times form part of a larger word. For instance the characters "zhong" 中 and "guo" 囯 can be used independently to mean "middle" and "kingdom", respectively, but can also be combined into "Zhongguo" 中囯, "China" (i.e. "The Middle Kingdom"). One could theoretically construct a noun phrase "Zhongguo zhong guo" 中囯中囯 meaning "kingdoms in the middle of China". The absence of any formal marking of word boundaries means that it would be difficult to mechanically determine if such a phrase consists of two, three, or four words without knowing Chinese. East Asian bibliographies therefore generally give only the "character count" without attempting any "word count".