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".
ABC Chinese–English Dictionary
The "ABC Dictionary" includes 5,425 different Chinese characters and a total 71,486 lexical entries. The dictionary's most notable feature is being entirely arranged by pinyin in the alphabetical order of complete compound words. For example, "kuàngquán" 矿泉 "mineral spring" immediately precedes "kuángquǎnbìng" 狂犬病 "rabies", which in turn immediately precedes "kuàngquánshuǐ" 矿泉水 "mineral water", even though the first and last words begin with the same character and the middle word with another (Sawer 2001: 224).