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.
CKC Chinese Input System
The encoding uses a maximum of 4 digits ("0" - "9") to represent a Chinese character. All possible shapes of strokes that forms any given Chinese character are classified into 10 groups, each represented by one of the ten possible digits 0-9. Chinese characters can then be input by following the order in which the strokes are identified at the 4 corners of the character. As a result of this simplicity in coding using the ten numeric digits, users typically need to use only a numeric keypad to input Chinese.