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.
Classical Chinese grammar
Compared to the written vernacular Chinese of today, the most notable difference is that Classical Chinese rarely uses words composed of two Chinese characters; nearly all words are written with one character only. This stands directly in contrast with vernacular Chinese, in which two-character words are extremely common. This phenomenon exists, in part, because as sound changes created homophones among words, compounding was used to resolve ambiguities.