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 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.