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".
The Five Thousand Dictionary
Each dictionary page has six columns (Fenn 1942: iv-v). The 1st column of each entry gives the head character, with any variant Chinese characters underneath linked by a line at the left, and the Standard Chinese tone indicated by a superscript on the character for the 4 tonal categories and a dot before it for the unstressed neutral tone (for example, s.v. "nü", "|⋅兒 a girl" for "nǚ'ér" (女兒 "daughter; girl") (1942: 369)). Most Chinese characters are classified as radical-phonetic characters that combine a semantically indicative "radical" with a phonologically indicative "phonetic". The 2nd column gives the head character's radical with its number in the 214 Kangxi radicals, and the 3rd gives the phonetic with its number in Soothill's dictionary (1900). The 4th column gives English translation equivalents for the character, common words written with it (abbreviated as "|" vertical bar), and indicates whether the character pronunciation is colloquial (俗) or literary (文), and whether it is used as a Classifier (C) or as a Surname (S). The 5th column gives alternate readings of the character, under which the user may find further information. The 6th column roughly indicates how frequently the character is used in Chinese, using the North China Union Language School's arrangement of the 5,000 character flashcards in ten groups of 500 each, lettered from A to K, with A for the 500 most commonly used characters and K for the 500 least commonly used.