Written Chinese
Because the majority of modern Chinese words contain more than one character, there are at least two measuring sticks for Chinese literacy: the number of characters known, and the number of words known. John DeFrancis, in the introduction to his "Advanced Chinese Reader", estimates that a typical Chinese college graduate recognizes 4,000 to 5,000 characters, and 40,000 to 60,000 words. Jerry Norman, in "Chinese", places the number of characters somewhat lower, at 3,000 to 4,000. These counts are complicated by the tangled development of Chinese characters. In many cases, a single character came to be written in multiple ways. This development was restrained to an extent by the standardization of the seal script during the Qin dynasty, but soon started again. Although the "Shuowen Jiezi" lists 10,516 characters—9,353 of them unique (some of which may already have been out of use by the time it was compiled) plus 1,163 graphic variants—the "Jiyun" of the Northern Song Dynasty, compiled less than a thousand years later in 1039, contains 53,525 characters, most of them graphic variants.
Luo Xian Xiang
When the communists continued to march on to win territory after territory, Luo Xian Xiang left for Hong Kong, where he lived a spartan, quiet life. He died of illness in 1968 at the age of 78.Chinese characters are complicated and depending on how the string of characters is put together, the meaning can be quite different. Post 1950, to speed up the education of the masses, People's Republic of China has implemented a Simplified Chinese characters set of over 2,300 characters. This is a version with less stokes per character, taken from the entire pool of the more complex tradition Chinese characters. The easier to learn simplified version covered the needs for written communication in the daily life of the general public.