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.
Written Chinese
Chinese characters conform to a roughly square frame and are not usually linked to one another, so do not have a preferred direction of writing. Traditionally Chinese text was written in vertical columns which were read from top to bottom, right-to-left; the first column being on the right side of the page, and the last column on the left. Text written in Classical Chinese also uses little or no punctuation, with sentence and phrase breaks being determined by context and rhythm. Vertical Chinese is still used for effect or where space requires it, such as signs or on spines of books.