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".
Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese
The "Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese" comprises approximately 5,000 single-character head entries, collated by radical-and-stroke and numbered according to the 214 Kangxi radicals. The twelve most frequent radicals are given at the bottom of the pages for the dictionary user to memorize. "To insure further the finding of the characters, the authors have entered each character under all its apparently possible radicals and made a cross reference to the main entry" (1947: xxvi). For instance, 魯 "luu" is entered under radical 72 曰 "sun", with the note "See Rad. 195 魚 ["fish"]." The "Concise Dictionary" includes the popular and cursive forms of many characters, as well as the Suzhou numerals (e.g., "〢 "ell" Soochow numeral for '2', used in trade"), and the Bopomofo symbols ("ㄎ "ke" National Phonetic letter for the aspirated initial "k""), which had never been included in a Chinese dictionary, thus removing "one source of bewilderment for the foreign student of Chinese" (Luo 1947: 434).