39 "standard Chinese characters" "A Chinese character orb Han character is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese, sometimes Korean, and formerly Vietnamese. The number of Chinese characters con- tained in the Kangxi dictionary is approximately 47,035, although a large number of these are rarely used variants accumulated throughout history. Studies carried out in China have shown that full literacy requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters.In the Chinese writing system, each character corresponds to a single spoken syllable. A majority of words in all modern varieties of Chinese are polysyllabic and thus require two or more characters to write. Cognates in the various Chinese languages/dialects which have the same or similar meaning but different pronunciations can be written with the 172
same character. In addition, many Chinese characters were adopted according to their
