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.
Oxis Chinese Character Finder
A set of twenty-four abstract graphics is used to describe the printed form of Chinese characters. Each graphic is represented by a single ascii digit or letter, and the graphics themselves can be approximated with Chinese characters. The characters and their text equivalents are: