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.
Chu Bong-Foo
Existing methods of looking up a Chinese character such as looking for its radicals or its Pinyin (or romanization) give only ambiguous results. On the other hand, while Chinese script has no alphabet, most characters are compounds of a common set of components. Chu assumed that it was possible to encode Chinese characters with a group of 'Chinese alphabets' which can be mapped on a common keyboard. After studying dictionary cut-outs and many tests, the team released a table of 8,000 encoded characters in 1976. This result was unsatisfactory for general use but did however prove the possibility of encoding Chinese in this way.