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".
Chinese characters
The most complex Chinese character still in use may be "biáng" (pictured right, bottom), with 58 strokes, which refers to Biang biang noodles, a type of noodle from China's Shaanxi province. This character along with the syllable "biáng" cannot be found in dictionaries. The fact that it represents a syllable that does not exist in any Standard Chinese word means that it could be classified as a dialectal character.