Character amnesia
It is difficult to establish exactly how many different Chinese characters are in use today; the new HSK, a widely used proficiency test for Standard Chinese as a second language, tests over 2,600 different characters, whilst in 1988 the People's Republic of China published the "List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese" which contains 7,000 different characters. In Japan, where a smaller set of characters are in general usage, the Japanese Ministry of Education prescribes the teaching of 2,136 kanji in primary and secondary school in a list called the jōyō kanji, meaning "regular-use Chinese characters".
Chinese characters
One area where character usage is officially restricted is in names, which may contain only government-approved characters. Since the "jōyō kanji" list excludes many characters that have been used in personal and place names for generations, an additional list, referred to as the "jinmeiyō kanji" (, lit. "kanji for use in personal names"), is published. It currently contains 983 characters.