CJK characters
Chinese is written almost exclusively in Chinese characters. It requires over 3,000 characters for general literacy, but up to 40,000 characters for reasonably complete coverage. Japanese uses fewer characters — general literacy in Japanese can be expected with 1,945 characters. The use of Chinese characters in Korea is becoming increasingly rare, although idiosyncratic use of Chinese characters in proper names requires knowledge (and therefore availability) of many more characters. However, even today, students in South Korea are taught 1,800 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.