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".
Jijiupian
The original "Jijiupian" consisted of 32 sections ("zhang" 章), each with 63 Chinese characters, totaling 2,016. Some later editions of the text add two more sections, each with 64 characters, thus totaling 2,144. The text was designed to include as many different characters as possible, with little repetition, in order to maximize the student's exposure to and learning of new words. The text is described as a sort of abecedarium (Goodrich 1975: 220, Yates 2011: 358).