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.
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".