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".
List of longest novels
A particular difficulty is created when comparing word counts across different writing systems. The logographic Chinese characters used to write East Asian languages each represent one "morpheme" and are not separated by spaces. The same character may at times stand for one word, and other times form part of a larger word. For instance the characters "zhong" 中 and "guo" 囯 can be used independently to mean "middle" and "kingdom", respectively, but can also be combined into "Zhongguo" 中囯, "China" (i.e. "The Middle Kingdom"). One could theoretically construct a noun phrase "Zhongguo zhong guo" 中囯中囯 meaning "kingdoms in the middle of China". The absence of any formal marking of word boundaries means that it would be difficult to mechanically determine if such a phrase consists of two, three, or four words without knowing Chinese. East Asian bibliographies therefore generally give only the "character count" without attempting any "word count".