How many characters are in written Chinese?

Written Chinese () comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: educated Chinese know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese.

Written Chinese

Various current Chinese characters have been traced back to the late Shang Dynasty about 1200–1050 BC, but the process of creating characters is thought to have begun some centuries earlier. After a period of variation and evolution, Chinese characters were standardized under the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC). Over the millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy. As the varieties of Chinese diverged, a situation of diglossia developed, with speakers of mutually unintelligible varieties able to communicate through writing using Classical Chinese. In the early 20th century, Classical Chinese was replaced in this role by written vernacular Chinese, corresponding to the standard spoken language ("Mandarin"). Although most other varieties of Chinese are not written, there are traditions of written Cantonese, written Shanghainese and written Hokkien, among others.

Some Chinese characters have been adopted into writing systems of other neighbouring East Asian languages, but are currently used only in Japanese and to a lesser extent in Korean, as Vietnamese is now written using alphabetic script.

Written Chinese is not based on an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Instead, Chinese characters are glyphs whose components may depict objects or represent abstract notions. Occasionally a character consists of only one component; more commonly two or more components are combined to form more complex characters, using a variety of different principles. The best known exposition of Chinese character composition is the "Shuowen Jiezi", compiled by Xu Shen around 120 AD. Since Xu Shen did not have access to Chinese characters in their earliest forms, his analysis cannot always be taken as authoritative. Nonetheless, no later work has supplanted the "Shuowen Jiezi" in terms of breadth, and it is still relevant to etymological research today.

According to the "Shuowen Jiezi", Chinese characters are developed on six basic principles. (These principles, though popularized by the "Shuowen Jiezi", were developed earlier; the oldest known mention of them is in the "Rites of Zhou", a text from about 150 BC.) The first two principles produce simple characters, known as 文 "wén":

The remaining four principles produce complex characters historically called 字 "zì" (although this term is now generally used to refer to all characters, whether simple or complex). Of these four, two construct characters from simpler parts:

In contrast to the popular conception of Chinese as a primarily pictographic or ideographic language, the vast majority of Chinese characters (about 95% of the characters in the "Shuowen Jiezi") are constructed as either logical aggregates or, more often, phonetic complexes. In fact, some phonetic complexes were originally simple pictographs that were later augmented by the addition of a semantic root. An example is 炷 "zhù" "candle" (now archaic, meaning "lampwick"), which was originally a pictograph 主, a character that is now pronounced "zhǔ" and means "host", or The character 火 "huǒ" "fire" was added to indicate that the meaning is fire-related.

The last two principles do not produce new written forms Instead, they transfer new meanings to existing forms:

Chinese characters are written to fit into a square, even when composed of two simpler forms written side-by-side or top-to-bottom. In such cases, each form is compressed to fit the entire character into a square.

Character components can be further subdivided into "strokes". The strokes of Chinese characters fall into eight main categories: horizontal (一), vertical (丨), left-falling (丿), right-falling (丶), rising (lower element of 冫), dot (、), hook (亅), and turning (乛, 乚, 乙, etc.).

There are eight basic rules of stroke order in writing a Chinese character:These rules do not strictly apply to every situation and are occasionally violated.

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.

In modern times, the familiar Western layout, left-to-right horizontal Chinese, has become more popular. Similar to Latin-letter text, the horizontal rows are read from left to right, then top of the page to the bottom. This is used especially in the People's Republic of China (mainland China), where the government mandated left-to-right writing in 1955. The government of the Republic of China (Taiwan) followed suit in 2004 for official documents. The use of punctuation has also become more common, whether the text is written in columns or rows. The punctuation marks are clearly influenced by their Western counterparts, although some marks are particular to Asian languages: for example, the double and single quotation marks (『 』 and 「 」); the hollow period dot (。), which is otherwise used just like an ordinary period full-stop; and a special kind of comma called an "enumeration comma" (、), which is used to separate items in a list, as opposed to clauses in a sentence.

Street and shop signs are a particularly challenging aspect of written Chinese layout, since they can be written either left-to-right, or right-to-left (the latter can be thought of as the traditional layout with each "column" being one character high), as well as from top to bottom. It is not uncommon to encounter all three orientations on signs on neighboring stores.

Chinese is one of the oldest continually used writing systems still in use. The earliest generally accepted examples of Chinese writing date back to the reign of the Shang Dynasty king Wu Ding (1250–1192 BC). These were divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones, primarily ox scapulae and turtle shells. Characters were carved on the bones in order to frame a question; the bones were then heated over a fire and the resulting cracks were interpreted to determine the answer. Such characters are called 甲骨文 "jiǎgǔwén" "shell-bone script" or oracle bone script.

In 2003, some 11 isolated symbols carved on tortoise shells were found at Jiahu, an archaeological site in the Henan province of China, some bearing a striking resemblance to certain modern characters, such as 目 "mù" "eye". Since the Jiahu site dates from about 6600 BC, it predates the earliest confirmed Chinese writing by more than 5,000 years. Dr Garman Harbottle, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, US, who headed a team of archaeologists at the University of Science and Technology of China, in Anhui province, has suggested that these symbols were precursors of Chinese writing, but Professor David Keightley, of the University of California, Berkeley, US whose field of expertise is the origins of Chinese civilization in the Neolithic and early Bronze Ages, employing archaeological and inscriptional evidence, suggests that the time gap is too great for a connection.

From the late Shang Dynasty, Chinese writing evolved into the form found in cast inscriptions on Chinese ritual bronzes made during the Western Zhou Dynasty (c 1066–770 BC) and the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BC), a kind of writing called 金文 "jīnwén" "metal script". Jinwen characters are less angular and angularized than the oracle bone script. Later, in the Warring States period (475–221 BC), the script became still more regular, and settled on a form, called 六國文字/六国文字 "liùguó wénzì" "script of the six states", that Xu Shen used as source material in the "Shuowen Jiezi". These characters were later embellished and stylized to yield the seal script, which represents the oldest form of Chinese characters still in modern use. They are used principally for signature seals, or chops, which are often used in place of a signature for Chinese documents and artwork. Li Si promulgated the seal script as the standard throughout the empire during the Qin dynasty, then newly unified.

Seal script in turn evolved into the other surviving writing styles; the first writing style to follow was the clerical script. The development of such a style can be attributed to those of the Qin Dynasty who were seeking to create a convenient form of written characters for daily usage. In general, clerical script characters are "flat" in appearance, being wider than the seal script, which tends to be taller than it is wide. Compared with the seal script, clerical script characters are strikingly rectilinear. In running script, a semi-cursive form, the character elements begin to run into each other, although the characters themselves generally remain separate.
Running script eventually evolved into grass script, a fully cursive form, in which the characters are often entirely unrecognizable by their canonical forms. Grass script gives the impression of anarchy in its appearance, and there is indeed considerable freedom on the part of the calligrapher, but this freedom is circumscribed by conventional "abbreviations" in the forms of the characters. Regular script, a non-cursive form, is the most widely recognized script. In regular script, each stroke of each character is clearly drawn out from the others. Even though both the running and grass scripts appear to be derived as semi-cursive and cursive variants of regular script, it is in fact the regular script that was the last to develop.

Regular script is considered the archetype for Chinese writing, and forms the basis for most printed forms. In addition, regular script imposes a stroke order, which must be followed in order for the characters to be written correctly. (Strictly speaking, this stroke order applies to the clerical, running, and grass scripts as well, but especially in the running and grass scripts, this order is occasionally deviated from.) Thus, for instance, the character 木 "mù" "wood" must be written starting with the horizontal stroke, drawn from left to right; next, the vertical stroke, from top to bottom; next, the left diagonal stroke, from top to bottom; and lastly the right diagonal stroke, from top to bottom.

In the 20th century, written Chinese divided into two canonical forms, called simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. Simplified Chinese was developed in mainland China in order to make the characters faster to write (especially as some characters had as many as a few dozen strokes) and easier to memorize. The People's Republic of China claims that both goals have been achieved, but some external observers disagree. Little systematic study has been conducted on how simplified Chinese has affected the way Chinese people become literate; the only studies conducted before it was standardized in mainland China seem to have been statistical ones regarding how many strokes were saved on average in samples of running text.

The simplified forms have also been criticized for being inconsistent. For instance, traditional 讓 "ràng" "allow" is simplified to 让, in which the phonetic on the right side is reduced from 17 strokes to just three. (The speech radical on the left has also been simplified.) However, the same phonetic is used in its full form, even in simplified Chinese, in such characters as 壤 "rǎng" "soil" and 齉 "nàng" "snuffle"; these forms remained uncontracted because they were relatively uncommon and would therefore represent a negligible stroke reduction. On the other hand, some simplified forms are simply long-standing calligraphic abbreviations, as for example 万 "wàn" "ten thousand", for which the traditional Chinese form is 萬.

Simplified Chinese is standard in the mainland of China, Singapore and Malaysia. Traditional Chinese is retained in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities (except Singapore and Malaysia). Throughout this article, Chinese text is given in both simplified and traditional forms when they differ, with the traditional forms being given first.

At the inception of written Chinese, spoken Chinese was monosyllabic; that is, Chinese words expressing independent concepts (objects, actions, relations, etc.) were usually one syllable. Each written character corresponded to one monosyllabic word. The spoken language has since become polysyllabic, but because modern polysyllabic words are usually composed of older monosyllabic words, Chinese characters have always been used to represent individual Chinese syllables.

For over two thousand years, the prevailing written standard was a vocabulary and syntax rooted in Chinese as spoken around the time of Confucius (about 500 BC), called Classical Chinese, or 文言文 "wényánwén". Over the centuries, Classical Chinese gradually acquired some of its grammar and character senses from the various dialects. This accretion was generally slow and minor; however, by the 20th century, Classical Chinese was distinctly different from any contemporary dialect, and had to be learned separately. Once learned, it was a common medium for communication between people speaking different dialects, many of which were mutually unintelligible by the end of the first millennium AD. A Mandarin speaker might say "yī", a Cantonese "yāt", a Shanghainese "iq", and a Hokkien "chit", but all four will understand the character <> to mean "one".

Chinese languages and dialects vary by not only pronunciation, but also, to a lesser extent, vocabulary and grammar. Modern written Chinese, which replaced Classical Chinese as the written standard as an indirect result of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, is not technically bound to any single variety; however, it most nearly represents the vocabulary and syntax of Mandarin, by far the most widespread Chinese dialectal family in terms of both geographical area and number of speakers. This version of written Chinese is called Vernacular Chinese, or 白話/白话 "báihuà" (literally, "plain speech"). Despite its ties to the dominant Mandarin language, Vernacular Chinese also permits some communication between people of different dialects, limited by the fact that Vernacular Chinese expressions are often ungrammatical or unidiomatic in non-Mandarin dialects. This role may not differ substantially from the role of other linguae francae, such as Latin: For those trained in written Chinese, it serves as a common medium; for those untrained in it, the graphic nature of the characters is in general no aid to common understanding (characters such as "one" notwithstanding). In this regard, Chinese characters may be considered a large and inefficient phonetic script. However, Ghil'ad Zuckermann’s exploration of phono-semantic matching in Standard Chinese concludes that the Chinese writing system is multifunctional, conveying both semantic and phonetic content.

The variation in vocabulary among dialects has also led to the informal use of "dialectal characters", as well as standard characters that are nevertheless considered archaic by today's standards. Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a written colloquial standard, used in Hong Kong and overseas, with a large number of unofficial characters for words particular to this language. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging, although for formal written communications Cantonese speakers still normally use Vernacular Chinese. To a lesser degree Hokkien is used in a similar way in Taiwan and elsewhere, although it lacks the level of standardization seen in Cantonese. However, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China is currently releasing a standard character set for Hokkien, which is to be taught in schools and promoted amongst the general population.

Chinese characters were first introduced into Japanese sometime in the first half of the first millennium AD, probably from Chinese products imported into Japan through Korea. At the time, Japanese had no native written system, and Chinese characters were used for the most part to represent Japanese words with the corresponding meanings, rather than similar pronunciations. A notable exception to this rule was the system of man'yōgana, which used a small set of Chinese characters to help indicate pronunciation. The man'yōgana later developed into the phonetic syllabaries, hiragana and katakana.

Chinese characters are called "hànzì" in Mandarin, after the Han Dynasty of China; in Japanese, this was pronounced "kanji". In modern written Japanese, kanji are used for most nouns, verb stems, and adjective stems, while hiragana are used for grammatical elements and miscellaneous words that have no common kanji rendition; katakana are used for transliteration of loanwords from other languages, the names of plants, animals and certain scientific or technical words, onomatopoeia and emphasis. The Jōyō kanji, a list of kanji for common use standardized by the Japanese government, contains 2,136 characters—about half the number of characters commanded by literate Chinese.

The role of Chinese characters in Korean and Vietnamese is much more limited. At one time, many Chinese characters (called hanja) were introduced into Korean for their meaning, just as in Japanese. Today, Korean is written almost exclusively using the Hangul alphabet with a small number of Chinese characters. Each square block character contains Hangul symbols, or letters, that together represent a syllable. Similarly, the use of Chinese and Chinese-styled characters in the Vietnamese chữ nôm script has been almost entirely superseded by the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet. Chinese characters are still actively used in South Korea today, mostly for signs, newspapers, books, and government documents.

Chinese characters are also used within China to write non-Han languages. The largest non-Han group in China, the Zhuang, have for over 1300 years used Chinese characters. Despite both the introduction of an official alphabetic script in 1957 and lack of a corresponding official set of Chinese characters, more Zhuang people can read the Zhuang logograms than the alphabetic script.

Over the history of written Chinese, a variety of media have been used for writing. They include:

Since at least the Han dynasty, such media have been used to create hanging scrolls and handscrolls.

Because the majority of modern Chinese words contain more than one character, there are at least two measuring sticks for Chinese literacy: the number of characters known, and the number of words known. John DeFrancis, in the introduction to his "Advanced Chinese Reader", estimates that a typical Chinese college graduate recognizes 4,000 to 5,000 characters, and 40,000 to 60,000 words. Jerry Norman, in "Chinese", places the number of characters somewhat lower, at 3,000 to 4,000. These counts are complicated by the tangled development of Chinese characters. In many cases, a single character came to be written in multiple ways. This development was restrained to an extent by the standardization of the seal script during the Qin dynasty, but soon started again. Although the "Shuowen Jiezi" lists 10,516 characters—9,353 of them unique (some of which may already have been out of use by the time it was compiled) plus 1,163 graphic variants—the "Jiyun" of the Northern Song Dynasty, compiled less than a thousand years later in 1039, contains 53,525 characters, most of them graphic variants.

Written Chinese is not based on an alphabet or syllabary, so Chinese dictionaries, as well as dictionaries that define Chinese characters in other languages, cannot easily be alphabetized or otherwise lexically ordered, as English dictionaries are. The need to arrange Chinese characters in order to permit efficient lookup has given rise to a considerable variety of ways to organize and index the characters.

A traditional mechanism is the method of radicals, which uses a set of character roots. These roots, or radicals, generally but imperfectly align with the parts used to compose characters by means of logical aggregation and phonetic complex. A canonical set of 214 radicals was developed during the rule of the Kangxi Emperor (around the year 1700); these are sometimes called the Kangxi radicals. The radicals are ordered first by stroke count (that is, the number of strokes required to write the radical); within a given stroke count, the radicals also have a prescribed order.

Every Chinese character falls (sometimes arbitrarily or incorrectly) under the heading of exactly one of these 214 radicals. In many cases, the radicals are themselves characters, which naturally come first under their own heading. All other characters under a given radical are ordered by the stroke count of the character. Usually, however, there are still many characters with a given stroke count under a given radical. At this point, characters are not given in any recognizable order; the user must locate the character by going through all the characters with that stroke count, typically listed for convenience at the top of the page on which they occur.

Because the method of radicals is applied only to the written character, one need not know how to pronounce a character before looking it up; the entry, once located, usually gives the pronunciation. However, it is not always easy to identify which of the various roots of a character is the proper radical. Accordingly, dictionaries often include a list of hard to locate characters, indexed by total stroke count, near the beginning of the dictionary. Some dictionaries include almost one-seventh of all characters in this list.

Other methods of organization exist, often in an attempt to address the shortcomings of the radical method, but are less common. For instance, it is common for a dictionary ordered principally by the Kangxi radicals to have an auxiliary index by pronunciation, expressed typically in either hanyu pinyin or zhuyin fuhao. This index points to the page in the main dictionary where the desired character can be found. Other methods use only the structure of the characters, such as the four-corner method, in which characters are indexed according to the kinds of strokes located nearest the four corners (hence the name of the method), or the Cangjie method, in which characters are broken down into a set of 24 basic components. Neither the four-corner method nor the Cangjie method requires the user to identify the proper radical, although many strokes or components have alternate forms, which must be memorized in order to use these methods effectively.

The availability of computerized Chinese dictionaries now makes it possible to look characters up by any of the indexing schemes described, thereby shortening the search process.

Chinese characters do not reliably indicate their pronunciation, even for one dialect. It is therefore useful to be able to transliterate a dialect of Chinese into the Latin alphabet or the Perso-Arabic script Xiao'erjing for those who cannot read Chinese characters. However, transliteration was not always considered merely a way to record the sounds of any particular dialect of Chinese; it was once also considered a potential replacement for the Chinese characters. This was first prominently proposed during the May Fourth Movement, and it gained further support with the victory of the Communists in 1949. Immediately afterward, the mainland government began two parallel programs relating to written Chinese. One was the development of an alphabetic script for Mandarin, which was spoken by about two-thirds of the Chinese population; the other was the simplification of the traditional characters—a process that would eventually lead to simplified Chinese. The latter was not viewed as an impediment to the former; rather, it would ease the transition toward the exclusive use of an alphabetic (or at least phonetic) script.

By 1958, however, priority was given officially to simplified Chinese; a phonetic script, hanyu pinyin, had been developed, but its deployment to the exclusion of simplified characters was pushed off to some distant future date. The association between pinyin and Mandarin, as opposed to other dialects, may have contributed to this deferment. It seems unlikely that pinyin will supplant Chinese characters anytime soon as the "sole" means of representing Chinese.

Pinyin uses the Latin alphabet, along with a few diacritical marks, to represent the sounds of Mandarin in standard pronunciation. For the most part, pinyin uses vowel and consonant letters as they are used in Romance languages (and also in IPA). However, although 'b' and 'p', for instance, represent the voice/unvoiced distinction in some languages, such as French, they represent the unaspirated/aspirated distinction in Mandarin; Mandarin has few voiced consonants. Also, the pinyin spellings for a few consonant sounds are markedly different from their spellings in other languages that use the Latin alphabet; for instance, pinyin 'q' and 'x' sound similar to English 'ch' and'sh', respectively. Pinyin is not the sole transliteration scheme for Mandarin—there are also, for instance, the zhuyin fuhao, Wade-Giles, and Gwoyeu Romatzyh systems—but it is dominant in the Chinese-speaking world. All transliterations in this article use the pinyin system.

Written Chinese

Some Chinese characters have been adopted into writing systems of other neighbouring East Asian languages, but are currently used only in Japanese and to a lesser extent in Korean, as Vietnamese is now written using alphabetic script.

According to the "Shuowen Jiezi", Chinese characters are developed on six basic principles. (These principles, though popularized by the "Shuowen Jiezi", were developed earlier; the oldest known mention of them is in the "Rites of Zhou", a text from about 150 BC.) The first two principles produce simple characters, known as 文 "wén":

The remaining four principles produce complex characters historically called 字 "zì" (although this term is now generally used to refer to all characters, whether simple or complex). Of these four, two construct characters from simpler parts:

In contrast to the popular conception of Chinese as a primarily pictographic or ideographic language, the vast majority of Chinese characters (about 95% of the characters in the "Shuowen Jiezi") are constructed as either logical aggregates or, more often, phonetic complexes. In fact, some phonetic complexes were originally simple pictographs that were later augmented by the addition of a semantic root. An example is 炷 "zhù" "candle" (now archaic, meaning "lampwick"), which was originally a pictograph 主, a character that is now pronounced "zhǔ" and means "host", or The character 火 "huǒ" "fire" was added to indicate that the meaning is fire-related.

The last two principles do not produce new written forms Instead, they transfer new meanings to existing forms:

Chinese characters are written to fit into a square, even when composed of two simpler forms written side-by-side or top-to-bottom. In such cases, each form is compressed to fit the entire character into a square.

Character components can be further subdivided into "strokes". The strokes of Chinese characters fall into eight main categories: horizontal (一), vertical (丨), left-falling (丿), right-falling (丶), rising (lower element of 冫), dot (、), hook (亅), and turning (乛, 乚, 乙, etc.).

There are eight basic rules of stroke order in writing a Chinese character:These rules do not strictly apply to every situation and are occasionally violated.

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.

Street and shop signs are a particularly challenging aspect of written Chinese layout, since they can be written either left-to-right, or right-to-left (the latter can be thought of as the traditional layout with each "column" being one character high), as well as from top to bottom. It is not uncommon to encounter all three orientations on signs on neighboring stores.

Chinese is one of the oldest continually used writing systems still in use. The earliest generally accepted examples of Chinese writing date back to the reign of the Shang Dynasty king Wu Ding (1250–1192 BC). These were divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones, primarily ox scapulae and turtle shells. Characters were carved on the bones in order to frame a question; the bones were then heated over a fire and the resulting cracks were interpreted to determine the answer. Such characters are called 甲骨文 "jiǎgǔwén" "shell-bone script" or oracle bone script.

Simplified Chinese is standard in the mainland of China, Singapore and Malaysia. Traditional Chinese is retained in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities (except Singapore and Malaysia). Throughout this article, Chinese text is given in both simplified and traditional forms when they differ, with the traditional forms being given first.

At the inception of written Chinese, spoken Chinese was monosyllabic; that is, Chinese words expressing independent concepts (objects, actions, relations, etc.) were usually one syllable. Each written character corresponded to one monosyllabic word. The spoken language has since become polysyllabic, but because modern polysyllabic words are usually composed of older monosyllabic words, Chinese characters have always been used to represent individual Chinese syllables.

Chinese characters were first introduced into Japanese sometime in the first half of the first millennium AD, probably from Chinese products imported into Japan through Korea. At the time, Japanese had no native written system, and Chinese characters were used for the most part to represent Japanese words with the corresponding meanings, rather than similar pronunciations. A notable exception to this rule was the system of man'yōgana, which used a small set of Chinese characters to help indicate pronunciation. The man'yōgana later developed into the phonetic syllabaries, hiragana and katakana.

Chinese characters are called "hànzì" in Mandarin, after the Han Dynasty of China; in Japanese, this was pronounced "kanji". In modern written Japanese, kanji are used for most nouns, verb stems, and adjective stems, while hiragana are used for grammatical elements and miscellaneous words that have no common kanji rendition; katakana are used for transliteration of loanwords from other languages, the names of plants, animals and certain scientific or technical words, onomatopoeia and emphasis. The Jōyō kanji, a list of kanji for common use standardized by the Japanese government, contains 2,136 characters—about half the number of characters commanded by literate Chinese.

Chinese characters are also used within China to write non-Han languages. The largest non-Han group in China, the Zhuang, have for over 1300 years used Chinese characters. Despite both the introduction of an official alphabetic script in 1957 and lack of a corresponding official set of Chinese characters, more Zhuang people can read the Zhuang logograms than the alphabetic script.

Over the history of written Chinese, a variety of media have been used for writing. They include:

Since at least the Han dynasty, such media have been used to create hanging scrolls and handscrolls.

Written Chinese is not based on an alphabet or syllabary, so Chinese dictionaries, as well as dictionaries that define Chinese characters in other languages, cannot easily be alphabetized or otherwise lexically ordered, as English dictionaries are. The need to arrange Chinese characters in order to permit efficient lookup has given rise to a considerable variety of ways to organize and index the characters.

A traditional mechanism is the method of radicals, which uses a set of character roots. These roots, or radicals, generally but imperfectly align with the parts used to compose characters by means of logical aggregation and phonetic complex. A canonical set of 214 radicals was developed during the rule of the Kangxi Emperor (around the year 1700); these are sometimes called the Kangxi radicals. The radicals are ordered first by stroke count (that is, the number of strokes required to write the radical); within a given stroke count, the radicals also have a prescribed order.

Every Chinese character falls (sometimes arbitrarily or incorrectly) under the heading of exactly one of these 214 radicals. In many cases, the radicals are themselves characters, which naturally come first under their own heading. All other characters under a given radical are ordered by the stroke count of the character. Usually, however, there are still many characters with a given stroke count under a given radical. At this point, characters are not given in any recognizable order; the user must locate the character by going through all the characters with that stroke count, typically listed for convenience at the top of the page on which they occur.

Because the method of radicals is applied only to the written character, one need not know how to pronounce a character before looking it up; the entry, once located, usually gives the pronunciation. However, it is not always easy to identify which of the various roots of a character is the proper radical. Accordingly, dictionaries often include a list of hard to locate characters, indexed by total stroke count, near the beginning of the dictionary. Some dictionaries include almost one-seventh of all characters in this list.

The availability of computerized Chinese dictionaries now makes it possible to look characters up by any of the indexing schemes described, thereby shortening the search process.

By 1958, however, priority was given officially to simplified Chinese; a phonetic script, hanyu pinyin, had been developed, but its deployment to the exclusion of simplified characters was pushed off to some distant future date. The association between pinyin and Mandarin, as opposed to other dialects, may have contributed to this deferment. It seems unlikely that pinyin will supplant Chinese characters anytime soon as the "sole" means of representing Chinese.

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.

CJK characters

In internationalization, CJK is a collective term for the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, all of which include Chinese characters and derivatives (collectively, CJK characters) in their writing systems. Occasionally, Vietnamese is included, making the abbreviation CJKV, since Vietnamese historically used Chinese characters as well. Collectively, the CJKV characters often include "hànzì" in Chinese, "kanji", "kana" in Japanese, "hanja", "hangul" in Korean, and "hán tự" or "chữ nôm" in Vietnamese.

Other scripts used for these languages, such as bopomofo and the Latin-based pinyin for Chinese, hiragana and katakana for Japanese, and hangul for Korean, are not strictly "CJK characters", although CJK character sets almost invariably include them as necessary for full coverage of the target languages.

Until the early 20th century, Literary Chinese was the written language of government and scholarship in Vietnam. Popular literature in Vietnamese was written in the "chữ Nôm" script, consisting of borrowed Chinese characters together with many characters created locally. By the end of the 1920s, both scripts had been replaced by writing in Vietnamese using the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet.

The sinologist Carl Leban (1971) produced an early survey of CJK encoding systems.

The number of characters required for complete coverage of all these languages' needs cannot fit in the 256-character code space of 8-bit character encodings, requiring at least a 16-bit fixed width encoding or multi-byte variable-length encodings. The 16-bit fixed width encodings, such as those from Unicode up to and including version 2.0, are now deprecated due to the requirement to encode more characters than a 16-bit encoding can accommodate—Unicode 5.0 has some 70,000 Han characters—and the requirement by the Chinese government that software in China support the GB 18030 character set.

Although CJK encodings have common character sets, the encodings often used to represent them have been developed separately by different East Asian governments and software companies, and are mutually incompatible. Unicode has attempted, with some controversy, to unify the character sets in a process known as Han unification.

CJK character encodings should consist minimally of Han characters plus language-specific phonetic scripts such as pinyin, bopomofo, hiragana, katakana and hangul.

CJK character encodings include:

The CJK character sets take up the bulk of the assigned Unicode code space. There is much controversy among Japanese experts of Chinese characters about the desirability and technical merit of the Han unification process used to map multiple Chinese and Japanese character sets into a single set of unified characters.

All three languages can be written both left-to-right and top-to-bottom (right-to-left and top-to-bottom in ancient documents), but are usually considered left-to-right scripts when discussing encoding issues.

Libraries cooperated on encoding standards for JACKPHY characters in the early 1980s. According to Ken Lunde, the abbreviation "CJK" was a registered trademark of Research Libraries Group (which merged with OCLC in 2006). The trademark owned by OCLC between 1987 and 2009 has now expired.

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.

History of education

The systematic provision of learning techniques to most children, such as literacy, has been a development of the last 150 to 200 years, or even last 50 years in some countries. Schools for the young have historically been supplemented with advanced training for priests, bureaucrats and specialists.

Starting in about 3500 B.C., various writing systems developed in ancient civilizations around the world. In Egypt fully developed hieroglyphs were in use at Abydos as early as 3400 B.C. The oldest known alphabet was developed in central Egypt around 2000 B.C. from a hieroglyphic prototype. One hieroglyphic script was used on stone monuments, other cursive scripts were used for writing in ink on papyrus, a flexible, paper-like material, made from the stems of reeds that grow in marshes and beside rivers such as the River Nile.

The Phoenician writing system was adapted from the Proto-Canaanite script in around the 11th century BC, which in turn borrowed ideas from Egyptian hieroglyphics. This script was adapted by the Greeks. A variant of the early Greek alphabet gave rise to the Etruscan alphabet, and its own descendants, such as the Latin alphabet. Other descendants from the Greek alphabet include the Cyrillic script, used to write Russian, among others.

The Phoenician system was also adapted into the Aramaic script, from which the Hebrew script and also that of Arabic are descended.

In China, the early oracle bone script has survived on tens of thousands of oracle bones dating from around 1400-1200 B.C. in the Shang Dynasty. Out of more than 2500 written characters in use in China in about 1200 BC, as many as 1400 are identifiable as the source of later standard Chinese characters.

Of several pre-Columbian scripts in Mesoamerica, the one that appears to have been best developed, and the one to be deciphered the most, is the Maya script. The earliest inscriptions which are identifiably Maya date to the 3rd century B.C., and writing was in continuous use until shortly after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century. In Chinese civilization, in school the children were not allowed to scribble. They were not to write slanted or sloppy charterers.

Other surfaces used for early writing include wax-covered writing boards (used, as well as clay tablets, by the Assyrians), sheets or strips of bark from trees (in Indonesia, Tibet and the Americas), the thick palm-like leaves of a particular tree, the leaves then punctured with a hole and stacked together like the pages of a book (these writings in India and South east Asia include Buddhist scriptures and Sanskrit literature), parchment, made of goatskin that had been soaked and scraped to remove hair, which was used from at least the 2nd century B.C., vellum, made from calfskin, and wax tablets which could be wiped clean to provide a fresh surface (in the Roman times).

Perhaps the earliest formal school was developed in Egypt's Middle Kingdom under the direction of Kheti, treasurer to Mentuhotep II.
In what became Mesopotamia, the early logographic system of cuneiform script took many years to master. Thus only a limited number of individuals were hired as scribes to be trained in its reading and writing. Only royal offspring and sons of the rich and professionals such as scribes, physicians, and temple administrators, were schooled. Most boys were taught their father's trade or were apprenticed to learn a trade. Girls stayed at home with their mothers to learn housekeeping and cooking, and to look after the younger children. Later, when a syllabic script became more widespread, more of the Mesopotamian population became literate. Later still in Babylonian times there were libraries in most towns and temples; an old Sumerian proverb averred that "he who would excel in the school of the scribes must rise with the dawn." There arose a whole social class of scribes, mostly employed in agriculture, but some as personal secretaries or lawyers. Women as well as men learned to read and write, and for the Semitic Babylonians, this involved knowledge of the extinct Sumerian language, and a complicated and extensive syllabary. Vocabularies, grammars, and interlinear translations were compiled for the use of students, as well as commentaries on the older texts and explanations of obscure words and phrases. Massive archives of texts were recovered from the archaeological contexts of Old Babylonian scribal schools, through which literacy was disseminated. The Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem from Ancient Mesopotamia is among the earliest known works of literary fiction. The earliest Sumerian versions of the epic date from as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur (2150-2000 BC) (Dalley 1989: 41-42).

Ashurbanipal (685 – c. 627 BC), a king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, was proud of his scribal education. His youthful scholarly pursuits included oil divination, mathematics, reading and writing as well as the usual horsemanship, hunting, chariotry, soldierliness, craftsmanship, and royal decorum. During his reign he collected cuneiform texts from all over Mesopotamia, and especially Babylonia, in the library in Nineveh, the first systematically organized library in the ancient Middle East, which survives in part today.

In ancient Egypt, literacy was concentrated among an educated elite of scribes. Only people from certain backgrounds were allowed to train to become scribes, in the service of temple, pharaonic, and military authorities. The hieroglyph system was always difficult to learn, but in later centuries was purposely made even more so, as this preserved the scribes' status. The rate of literacy in Pharaonic Egypt during most periods from the third to first millennium BC has been estimated at not more than one percent, or between one half of one percent and one percent.

In ancient Israel, the Torah (the fundamental religious text) includes commands to read, learn, teach and write the Torah, thus requiring literacy and study. In 64 AD the high priest caused schools to be opened. Emphasis was placed on developing good memory skills in addition to comprehension oral repetition. For details of the subjects taught, see History of education in ancient Israel and Judah. Although girls were not provided with formal education in the yeshivah, they were required to know a large part of the subject areas to prepare them to maintain the home after marriage, and to educate the children before the age of seven. Despite this schooling system, it would seem that many children did not learn to read and write, because it has been estimated that "at least ninety percent of the Jewish population of Roman Palestine [in the first centuries AD] could merely write their own name or not write and read at all", or that the literacy rate was about 3 percent.

In the Islamic civilization that spread all the way between China and Spain during the time between the 7th and 19th centuries, Muslims started schooling from 622 in Medina, which is now a city in Saudi Arabia, schooling at first was in the mosques (masjid in Arabic) but then schools became separate in schools next to mosques. The first separate school was the Nizamiyah school. It was built in 1066 in Baghdad. children started school from the age of six with free tuition. The teaches of Quran (the holy book of Muslims) claims that Muslims should learn to read, write and explore the universe. Thus, education and schooling sprang up in the ancient Muslim societies. Moreover, Muslims had one of the first universities in history which is Al-Qarawiyin University in Fez, Morocco. It was originally a mosque that was built in 859.
In ancient India, during the Vedic period from about 1500 BC to 600 BC, most education was based on the Veda (hymns, formulas, and incantations, recited or chanted by priests of a pre-Hindu tradition) and later Hindu texts and scriptures.

Vedic education included: proper pronunciation and recitation of the Veda, the rules of sacrifice, grammar and derivation, composition, versification and meter, understanding of secrets of nature, reasoning including logic, the sciences, and the skills necessary for an occupation. Some medical knowledge existed and was taught. There is mention in the Veda of herbal medicines for various conditions or diseases, including fever, cough, baldness, snake bite and others.

Education, at first freely available in Vedic society, became over time more rigid and restricted as the social systems dictated that only those of meritorious lineage be allowed to study the scriptures, originally based on occupation, evolved, with the Brahman (priests) being the most privileged of the castes, followed by Kshatriya who could also wear the sacred thread and gain access to Vedic education. The Brahmans were given priority even over Kshatriya as they would dedicate their whole lives to such studies.

The oldest of the Upanishads - another part of Hindu scriptures - date from around 500 BC. These texts encouraged an exploratory learning process where teachers and students were co-travellers in a search for truth. The teaching methods used reasoning and questioning. Nothing was labeled as the final answer.

The Gurukul system of education supported traditional Hindu residential schools of learning; typically the teacher's house or a monastery. Education was free, but students from well-to-do families paid "Gurudakshina," a voluntary contribution after the completion of their studies. At the Gurukuls, the teacher imparted knowledge of Religion, Scriptures, Philosophy, Literature, Warfare, Statecraft, Medicine, Astrology and History. The corpus of Sanskrit literature encompasses a rich tradition of poetry and drama as well as technical scientific, philosophical and generally Hindu religious texts, though many central texts of Buddhism and Jainism have also been composed in Sanskrit.

Two epic poems formed part of ancient Indian education. The Mahabharata, part of which may date back to the 8th century BC, discusses human goals (purpose, pleasure, duty, and liberation), attempting to explain the relationship of the individual to society and the world (the nature of the 'Self') and the workings of karma. The other epic poem, Ramayana, is shorter, although it has 24,000 verses. It is thought to have been compiled between about 400 BC and 200 AD. The epic explores themes of human existence and the concept of dharma.

An early center of learning in India dating back to the 5th century BC was Taxila (also known as Takshashila), which taught the three Vedas and the eighteen accomplishments. It was an important Vedic/Hindu and Buddhist centre of learning from the 6th century BC to the 5th century AD.

During the Zhou dynasty (1045 BC to 256 BC), there were five national schools in the capital city, Pi Yong (an imperial school, located in a central location) and four other schools for the aristocrats and nobility, including Shang Xiang. The schools mainly taught the Six Arts: rites, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy, and mathematics. According to the Book of Rites, at age twelve, boys learned arts related to ritual (i.e. music and dance) and when older, archery and chariot driving. Girls learned ritual, correct deportment, silk production and weaving.

It was during the Zhou dynasty that the origins of native Chinese philosophy also developed. Confucius (551 BC – 479 BC) founder of Confucianism, was a Chinese philosopher who made a great impact on later generations of Chinese, and on the curriculum of the Chinese educational system for much of the following 2000 years.

Later, during the Qin dynasty (246–207 BC), a hierarchy of officials was set up to provide central control over the outlying areas of the empire. To enter this hierarchy, both literacy and knowledge of the increasing body of philosophy was required: "...the content of the educational process was designed not to engender functionally specific skills but rather to produce morally enlightened and cultivated generalists".

During the Han dynasty (206 BC – 221 AD), boys were thought ready at age seven to start learning basic skills in reading, writing and calculation. In 124 BC, the Emperor Wudi established the Imperial Academy, the curriculum of which was the Five Classics of Confucius. By the end of the Han dynasty (220 AD) the Academy enrolled more than 30,000 students, boys between the ages of fourteen and seventeen years. However education through this period was a luxury.

The nine-rank system was a civil service nomination system during the Three Kingdoms (220–280 AD) and the Northern and Southern dynasties (420–589 AD) in China. Theoretically, local government authorities were given the task of selecting talented candidates, then categorizing them into nine grades depending on their abilities. In practice, however, only the rich and powerful would be selected. The Nine Rank System was eventually superseded by the Imperial examination system for the civil service in the Sui dynasty (581–618 AD)

In the city-states of ancient Greece, most education was private, except in Sparta. For example, in Athens, during the 5th and 4th century BC, aside from two years military training, the state played little part in schooling. Anyone could open a school and decide the curriculum. Parents could choose a school offering the subjects they wanted their children to learn, at a monthly fee they could afford. Most parents, even the poor, sent their sons to schools for at least a few years, and if they could afford it from around the age of seven until fourteen, learning gymnastics (including athletics, sport and wrestling), music (including poetry, drama and history) and literacy. Girls rarely received formal education. At writing school, the youngest students learned the alphabet by song, then later by copying the shapes of letters with a stylus on a waxed wooden tablet. After some schooling, the sons of poor or middle-class families often learnt a trade by apprenticeship, whether with their father or another tradesman. By around 350 BC, it was common for children at schools in Athens to also study various arts such as drawing, painting, and sculpture. The richest students continued their education by studying with sophists, from whom they could learn subjects such as rhetoric, mathematics, geography, natural history, politics, and logic. Some of Athens' greatest schools of higher education included the Lyceum (the so-called Peripatetic school founded by Aristotle of Stageira) and the Platonic Academy (founded by Plato of Athens). The education system of the wealthy ancient Greeks is also called Paideia. In the subsequent Roman empire, Greek was the primary language of science. Advanced scientific research and teaching was mainly carried on in the Hellenistic side of the Roman empire, in Greek.

The education system in the Greek city-state of Sparta was entirely different, designed to create warriors with complete obedience, courage, and physical perfection. At the age of seven, boys were taken away from their homes to live in school dormitories or military barracks. There they were taught sports, endurance and fighting, and little else, with harsh discipline. Most of the population was illiterate.

The first schools in Ancient Rome arose by the middle of the 4th century BC. These schools were concerned with the basic socialization and rudimentary education of young Roman children. The literacy rate in the 3rd century BC has been estimated as around one percent to two percent. There are very few primary sources or accounts of Roman educational process until the 2nd century BC, during which there was a proliferation of private schools in Rome. At the height of the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire, the Roman educational system gradually found its final form. Formal schools were established, which served paying students (very little in the way of free public education as we know it can be found). Normally, both boys and girls were educated, though not necessarily together. In a system much like the one that predominates in the modern world, the Roman education system that developed arranged schools in tiers. The educator Quintilian recognized the importance of starting education as early as possible, noting that "memory … not only exists even in small children, but is specially retentive at that age". A Roman student would progress through schools just as a student today might go from elementary school to middle school, then to high school, and finally college. Progression depended more on ability than age with great emphasis being placed upon a student's "ingenium" or inborn "gift" for learning, and a more tacit emphasis on a student's ability to afford high-level education. Only the Roman elite would expect a complete formal education. A tradesman or farmer would expect to pick up most of his vocational skills on the job. Higher education in Rome was more of a status symbol than a practical concern.

Literacy rates in the Greco-Roman world were seldom more than 20 percent; averaging perhaps not much above 10 percent in the Roman empire, though with wide regional variations, probably never rising above 5 percent in the western provinces. The literate in classical Greece did not much exceed 5 percent of the population.

During the Early Middle Ages, the monasteries of the Roman Catholic Church were the centers of education and literacy, preserving the Church's selection from Latin learning and maintaining the art of writing. Prior to their formal establishment, many medieval universities were run for hundreds of years as Christian monastic schools ("Scholae monasticae"), in which monks taught classes, and later as cathedral schools; evidence of these immediate forerunners of the later university at many places dates back to the early 6th century.

The first medieval institutions generally considered to be universities were established in Italy, France, and England in the late 11th and the 12th centuries for the study of arts, law, medicine, and theology.[1] These universities evolved from much older Christian cathedral schools and monastic schools, and it is difficult to define the date on which they became true universities, although the lists of studia generalia for higher education in Europe held by the Vatican are a useful guide.

Students in the twelfth-century were very proud of the master whom they studied under. They were not very concerned with telling others the place or region where they received their education. Even now when scholars cite schools with distinctive doctrines, they use group names to describe the school rather than its geographical location. Those who studied under Robert of Melun were called the "Meludinenses". These people did not study in Melun, but in Paris, and were given the group name of their master. Citizens in the twelfth-century became very interested in learning the rare and difficult skills masters could provide.

Ireland became known as the island of saints and scholars. Monasteries were built all over Ireland and these became centres of great learning (see Celtic Church).

Northumbria was famed as a centre of religious learning and arts. Initially the kingdom was evangelized by monks from the Celtic Church, which led to a flowering of monastic life, and Northumbria played an important role in the formation of Insular art, a unique style combining Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Byzantine and other elements. After the Synod of Whitby in 664 AD, Roman church practices officially replaced the Celtic ones but the influence of the Anglo-Celtic style continued, the most famous examples of this being the Lindisfarne Gospels. The Venerable Bede (673-735) wrote his "Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum" (Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731) in a Northumbrian monastery, and much of it focuses on the kingdom.

During the reign of Charlemagne, King of the Franks from 768 – 814 AD, whose empire united most of Western Europe for the first time since the Romans, there was a flowering of literature, art, and architecture known as the Carolingian Renaissance. Brought into contact with the culture and learning of other countries through his vast conquests, Charlemagne greatly increased the provision of monastic schools and scriptoria (centres for book-copying) in Francia. Most of the surviving works of classical Latin were copied and preserved by Carolingian scholars.

Charlemagne took a serious interest in scholarship, promoting the liberal arts at the court, ordering that his children and grandchildren be well-educated, and even studying himself under the tutelage of Paul the Deacon, from whom he learned grammar, Alcuin, with whom he studied rhetoric, dialect and astronomy (he was particularly interested in the movements of the stars), and Einhard, who assisted him in his studies of arithmetic. The English monk Alcuin was invited to Charlemagne's court at Aachen, and brought with him the precise classical Latin education that was available in the monasteries of Northumbria. The return of this Latin proficiency to the kingdom of the Franks is regarded as an important step in the development of mediaeval Latin. Charlemagne's chancery made use of a type of script currently known as Carolingian minuscule, providing a common writing style that allowed for communication across most of Europe. After the decline of the Carolingian dynasty, the rise of the Saxon Dynasty in Germany was accompanied by the Ottonian Renaissance.
Cathedral schools and monasteries remained important throughout the Middle Ages; at the Third Lateran Council of 1179 the Church mandated that priests provide the opportunity of a free education to their flocks, and the 12th and 13th century renascence known as the Scholastic Movement was spread through the monasteries. These however ceased to be the sole sources of education in the 11th century when universities, which grew out of the monasticism began to be established in major European cities. Literacy became available to a wider class of people, and there were major advances in art, sculpture, music and architecture.

In 1120, Dunfermline Abbey in Scotland by order of Malcolm Canmore and his Queen, Margaret, built and established the first high school in the UK, Dunfermline High School. This highlighted the monastery influence and developments made for education, from the ancient capital of Scotland.

Sculpture, paintings and stained glass windows were vital educational media through which Biblical themes and the lives of the saints were taught to illiterate viewers.

During the 6th and 7th centuries, the Academy of Gundishapur, originally the intellectual center of the Sassanid empire and subsequently a Muslim centre of learning, offered training in medicine, philosophy, theology and science. The faculty were versed not only in the Zoroastrian and Persian traditions, but in Greek and Indian learning as well.

The University of al-Qarawiyyin located in Fes, Morocco is the oldest existing, continually operating and the first degree awarding educational institution in the world according to UNESCO and Guinness World Records and is sometimes referred to as the oldest university.

The House of Wisdom in Baghdad was a library, translation and educational centre from the 9th to 13th centuries. Works on astrology, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, and philosophy were translated. Drawing on Persian, Indian and Greek texts—including those of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Euclid, Plotinus, Galen, Sushruta, Charaka, Aryabhata and Brahmagupta—the scholars accumulated a great collection of knowledge in the world, and built on it through their own discoveries. The House was an unrivalled centre for the study of humanities and for sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, zoology and geography. Baghdad was known as the world's richest city and centre for intellectual development of the time, and had a population of over a million, the largest in its time.

The Islamic mosque school (Madrasah) taught the Quran in Arabic and did not at all resemble the medieval European universities.

In the 9th century, Bimaristan medical schools were formed in the medieval Islamic world, where medical diplomas were issued to students of Islamic medicine who were qualified to be a practicing Doctor of Medicine. Al-Azhar University, founded in Cairo, Egypt in 975, was a "Jami'ah" ("university" in Arabic) which offered a variety of post-graduate degrees, had a Madrasah and theological seminary, and taught Islamic law, Islamic jurisprudence, Arabic grammar, Islamic astronomy, early Islamic philosophy and logic in Islamic philosophy.

Under the Ottoman Empire, the towns of Bursa and Edirne became major centers of learning.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, the town of Timbuktu in the West African nation of Mali became an Islamic centre of learning with students coming from as far away as the Middle East. The town was home to the prestigious Sankore University and other madrasas. The primary focus of these schools was the teaching of the Qur'an, although broader instruction in fields such as logic, astronomy, and history also took place. Over time, there was a great accumulation of manuscripts in the area and an estimated 100,000 or more manuscripts, some of them dated from pre-Islamic times and 12th century, are kept by the great families from the town. Their contents are didactic, especially in the subjects of astronomy, music, and botany. More than 18,000 manuscripts have been collected by the Ahmed Baba centre.

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.

In China, three oral texts were used to teach children by rote memorization the written characters of their language and the basics of Confucian thought.

The Thousand Character Classic, a Chinese poem originating in the 6th century, was used for more than a millennium as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children. The poem is composed of 250 phrases of four characters each, thus containing exactly one thousand unique characters, and was sung in the same way that children learning the Latin alphabet may use the "alphabet song".

Later, children also learn the Hundred Family Surnames, a rhyming poem in lines of eight characters composed in the early Song dynasty (i.e. in about the 11th century) which actually listed more than four hundred of the common surnames in ancient China.

From around the 13th century until the latter part of the 19th century, the Three Character Classic, which is an embodiment of Confucian thought suitable for teaching to young children, served as a child's first formal education at home. The text is written in triplets of characters for easy memorization. With illiteracy common for most people at the time, the oral tradition of reciting the classic ensured its popularity and survival through the centuries. With the short and simple text arranged in three-character verses, children learned many common characters, grammar structures, elements of Chinese history and the basis of Confucian morality.

After learning Chinese characters, students wishing to ascend in the social hierarchy needed to study the Chinese classic texts.

The early Chinese state depended upon literate, educated officials for operation of the empire. In 605 AD, during the Sui dynasty, for the first time, an examination system was explicitly instituted for a category of local talents. The merit-based imperial examination system for evaluating and selecting officials gave rise to schools that taught the Chinese classic texts and continued in use for 1,300 years, until the end the Qing dynasty, being abolished in 1911 in favour of Western education methods. The core of the curriculum for the imperial civil service examinations from the mid-12th century onwards was the Four Books, representing a foundational introduction to Confucianism.

Theoretically, any male adult in China, regardless of his wealth or social status, could become a high-ranking government official by passing the imperial examination, although under some dynasties members of the merchant class were excluded. In reality, since the process of studying for the examination tended to be time-consuming and costly (if tutors were hired), most of the candidates came from the numerically small but relatively wealthy land-owning gentry. However, there are vast numbers of examples in Chinese history in which individuals moved from a low social status to political prominence through success in imperial examination. Under some dynasties the imperial examinations were abolished and official posts were simply sold, which increased corruption and reduced morale.

In the period preceding 1040–1050 AD, prefectural schools had been neglected by the state and left to the devices of wealthy patrons who provided private finances. The chancellor of China at that time, Fan Zhongyan, issued an edict that would have used a combination of government funding and private financing to restore and rebuild all prefectural schools that had fallen into disuse and abandoned. He also attempted to restore all county-level schools in the same manner, but did not designate where funds for the effort would be formally acquired and the decree was not taken seriously until a later period. Fan's trend of government funding for education set in motion the movement of public schools that eclipsed private academies, which would not be officially reversed until the mid-13th century.

The first millennium and the few centuries preceding it saw the flourishing of higher education at Nalanda, Takshashila University, Ujjain, & Vikramshila Universities. Amongst the subjects taught were Art, Architecture, Painting, Logic, mathematics, Grammar, Philosophy, Astronomy, Literature, Buddhism, Hinduism, Arthashastra (Economics & Politics), Law, and Medicine. Each university specialized in a particular field of study. Takshila specialized in the study of medicine, while Ujjain laid emphasis on astronomy. Nalanda, being the biggest centre, handled all branches of knowledge, and housed up to 10,000 students at its peak.

Vikramashila Mahavihara, another important center of Buddhist learning in India, was established by King Dharmapala (783 to 820) in response to a supposed decline in the quality of scholarship at Nālandā.

Indigenous education was widespread in India in the 18th century, with a school for every temple, mosque or village in most regions of the country. The subjects taught included Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Theology, Law, Astronomy, Metaphysics, Ethics, Medical Science and Religion. The schools were attended by students representative of all classes of society.

The history of education in Japan dates back at least to the 6th century, when Chinese learning was introduced at the Yamato court. Foreign civilizations have often provided new ideas for the development of Japan's own culture.

Chinese teachings and ideas flowed into Japan from the sixth to the 9th century. Along with the introduction of Buddhism came the Chinese system of writing and its literary tradition, and Confucianism.

By the 9th century, Heian-kyo (today's Kyoto), the imperial capital, had five institutions of higher learning, and during the remainder of the Heian period, other schools were established by the nobility and the imperial court. During the medieval period (1185-1600), Zen Buddhist monasteries were especially important centers of learning, and the Ashikaga School, Ashikaga Gakko, flourished in the 15th century as a center of higher learning.

Aztec is a term used to refer to certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who achieved political and military dominance over large parts of Mesoamerica in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, a period referred to as the Late post-Classic period in Mesoamerican chronology.

Until the age of fourteen, the education of children was in the hands of their parents, but supervised by the authorities of their "calpōlli". Part of this education involved learning a collection of sayings, called "huēhuetlàtolli" ("sayings of the old"), that embodied the Aztecs' ideals. Judged by their language, most of the "huēhuetlàtolli" seemed to have evolved over several centuries, predating the Aztecs and most likely adopted from other Nahua cultures.

At 15, all boys and girls went to school. The Mexica, one of the Aztec groups, were one of the first people in the world to have mandatory education for nearly all children, regardless of gender, rank, or station. There were two types of schools: the "telpochcalli", for practical and military studies, and the "calmecac", for advanced learning in writing, astronomy, statesmanship, theology, and other areas. The two institutions seem to be common to the Nahua people, leading some experts to suggest that they are older than the Aztec culture.

Aztec teachers ("tlatimine") propounded a spartan regime of education with the purpose of forming a stoical people.

Girls were educated in the crafts of home and child raising. They were not taught to read or write. All women were taught to be involved in religion; there are paintings of women presiding over religious ceremonies, but there are no references to female priests.

Inca education during the time of the Inca Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries was divided into two principal spheres: education for the upper classes and education for the general population. The royal classes and a few specially chosen individuals from the provinces of the Empire were formally educated by the Amautas (wise men), while the general population learned knowledge and skills from their immediate forebears.

The Amautas constituted a special class of wise men similar to the bards of Great Britain. They included illustrious philosophers, poets, and priests who kept the oral histories of the Incas alive by imparting the knowledge of their culture, history, customs and traditions throughout the kingdom. Considered the most highly educated and respected men in the Empire, the Amautas were largely entrusted with educating those of royal blood, as well as other young members of conquered cultures specially chosen to administer the regions. Thus, education throughout the territories of the Incas was socially discriminatory, most people not receiving the formal education that royalty received.

The official language of the empire was Quechua, although dozens if not hundreds of local languages were spoken. The Amautas did ensure that the general population learn Quechua as the language of the Empire, much in the same way the Romans promoted Latin throughout Europe; however, this was done more for political reasons than educational ones.

Modern systems of education in Europe derive their origins from the schools of the High Middle Ages. Most schools during this era were founded upon religious principles with the primary purpose of training the clergy. Many of the earliest universities, such as the University of Paris founded in 1160, had a Christian basis. In addition to this, a number of secular universities existed, such as the University of Bologna, founded in 1088. Free education for the poor was officially mandated by the Church in 1179 when it decreed that every cathedral must assign a master to teach boys too poor to pay the regular fee; parishes and monasteries also established free schools teaching at least basic literary skills. With few exceptions, priests and brothers taught locally, and their salaries were frequently subsidized by towns. Private, independent schools reappeared in medieval Europe during this time, but they, too, were religious in nature and mission. The curriculum was usually based around the trivium and to a lesser extent quadrivium (the seven Artes Liberales or Liberal arts) and was conducted in Latin, the lingua franca of educated Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

In northern Europe this clerical education was largely superseded by forms of elementary schooling following the Reformation. In Scotland, for instance, the national Church of Scotland set out a programme for spiritual reform in January 1561 setting the principle of a school teacher for every parish church and free education for the poor. This was provided for by an Act of the Parliament of Scotland, passed in 1633, which introduced a tax to pay for this programme. Although few countries of the period had such extensive systems of education, the period between the 16th and 18th centuries saw education become significantly more widespread.

Herbart developed a system of pedagogy widely used in German-speaking areas.
Mass compulsory schooling started in Prussia c1800 to "produce more soldiers and more obedient citizens"

In Central Europe, the 17th century scientist and educator John Amos Comenius promulgated a reformed system of universal education that was widely used in Europe.
his growth resulted in increased government interest in education. In the 1760s, for instance, Ivan Betskoy was appointed by the Russian Tsarina, Catherine II, as educational advisor. He proposed to educate young Russians of both sexes in state boarding schools, aimed at creating "a new race of men". Betskoy set forth a number of arguments for general education of children rather than specialized one: "in regenerating our subjects by an education founded on these principles, we will create... new citizens." Some of his ideas were implemented in the Smolny Institute that he established for noble girls in Saint Petersburg.

Poland established in 1773 of a Commission of National Education (Polish: "Komisja Edukacji Narodowej", Lithuanian: "Nacionaline Edukacine Komisija"). The commission functioned as the first government Ministry of Education in a European country.

By the 18th century, universities published academic journals; by the 19th century, the German and the French university models were established. The French established the Ecole Polytechnique in 1794 by the mathematician Gaspard Monge during the French Revolution, and it became a military academy under Napoleon I in 1804. The German university — the Humboldtian model — established by Wilhelm von Humboldt was based upon Friedrich Schleiermacher’s liberal ideas about the importance of seminars, and laboratories. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the universities concentrated upon science, and served an upper class clientele. Science, mathematics, theology, philosophy, and ancient history comprised the typical curriculum.

Increasing academic interest in education led to analysis of teaching methods and in the 1770s the establishment of the first chair of pedagogy at the University of Halle in Germany. Contributions to the study of education elsewhere in Europe included the work of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi in Switzerland and Joseph Lancaster in Britain.
In 1884, a groundbreaking education conference was held in London at the International Health Exhibition, attracting specialists from all over Europe.

In the late 19th century, most of West, Central, and parts of East Europe began to provide elementary education in reading, writing, and arithmetic, partly because politicians believed that education was needed for orderly political behavior. As more people became literate, they realized that most secondary education was only open to those who could afford it. Having created primary education, the major nations had to give further attention to secondary education by the time of World War I.

In the 20th century, new directions in education included, in Italy, Maria Montessori's Montessori schools; and in Germany, Rudolf Steiner's development of Waldorf education.

In the Ancien Régime before 1789, educational facilities and aspirations were becoming increasingly institutionalized primarily in order to supply the church and state with the functionaries to serve as their future administrators. France had many small local schools where working-class children — both boys and girls — learned to read, the better to know, love and serve God. The sons and daughters of the noble and bourgeois elites, however, were given quite distinct educations: boys were sent to upper school, perhaps a university, while their sisters perhaps were sent for finishing at a convent. The Enlightenment challenged this old ideal, but no real alternative presented itself for female education. Only through education at home were knowledgeable women formed, usually to the sole end of dazzling their salons.

The modern era of French education begins in the 1790s. The Revolution in the 1790s abolished the traditional universities" Napoleon sought to replace them with new institutions, the Polytechnique, focused on technology. The elementary schools received little attention until 1830, when France copied the Prussian system.

Jules Ferry, an anti-clerical politician holding the office of Minister of Public Instruction in the 1880s, created the modern Republican school ("l'école républicaine") by requiring all children under the age of 15—boys and girls—to attend. see Jules Ferry laws Schools were free of charge and secular ("laïque"). The goal was to break the hold of the Catholic Church and monarchism on young people. Catholic schools were still tolerated but in the early 20th century the religious orders sponsoring them were shut down.

In 1818, John Pounds set up a school and began teaching poor children reading, writing, and mathematics without charging fees.
In 1820, Samuel Wilderspin opened the first infant school in Spitalfield. In August 1833, Parliament voted to sum money to support poor children's school fees in England and Wales.
In 1837, the Whig former Lord Chancellor Henry Brougham presented a bill for public education.

Japan isolated itself from the rest of the world in the year 1600 under the Tokugawa regime (1600–1867). In 1600 very few common people were literate. By the period's end, learning had become widespread. Tokugawa education left a valuable legacy: an increasingly literate populace, a meritocratic ideology, and an emphasis on discipline and competent performance. Traditional Samurai curricula for elites stressed morality and the martial arts. Confucian classics were memorized, and reading and recitation of them were common methods of study. Arithmetic and calligraphy were also studied. Education of commoners was generally practically oriented, providing basic 3-Rs, calligraphy and use of the abacus. Much of this education was conducted in so-called temple schools (terakoya), derived from earlier Buddhist schools. These schools were no longer religious institutions, nor were they, by 1867, predominantly located in temples. By the end of the Tokugawa period, there were more than 11,000 such schools, attended by 750,000 students. Teaching techniques included reading from various textbooks, memorizing, abacus, and repeatedly copying Chinese characters and Japanese script. By the 1860s, 40-50% of Japanese boys, and 15% of the girls, had some schooling outside the home. These rates were comparable to major European nations at the time (apart from Germany, which had compulsory schooling). Under subsequent Meiji leadership, this foundation would facilitate Japan's rapid transition from feudal society to modern nation which paid very close attention to Western science, technology and educational methods.

After 1868 reformers set Japan on a rapid course of modernization, with a public education system like that of Western Europe. Missions like the Iwakura mission were sent abroad to study the education systems of leading Western countries. They returned with the ideas of decentralization, local school boards, and teacher autonomy. Elementary school enrollments climbed from about 40 or 50 percent of the school-age population in the 1870s to more than 90 percent by 1900, despite strong public protest, especially against school fees.

A modern concept of childhood emerged in Japan after 1850 as part of its engagement with the West. Meiji era leaders decided the nation-state had the primary role in mobilizing individuals - and children - in service of the state. The Western-style school became the agent to reach that goal. By the 1890s, schools were generating new sensibilities regarding childhood. After 1890 Japan had numerous reformers, child experts, magazine editors, and well-educated mothers who bought into the new sensibility. They taught the upper middle class a model of childhood that included children having their own space where they read children's books, played with educational toys and, especially, devoted enormous time to school homework. These ideas rapidly disseminated through all social classes

After 1870 school textbooks based on Confucianism were replaced by westernized texts. However, by the 1890s, a reaction set in and a more authoritarian approach was imposed. Traditional Confucian and Shinto precepts were again stressed, especially those concerning the hierarchical nature of human relations, service to the new state, the pursuit of learning, and morality. These ideals, embodied in the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education, along with highly centralized government control over education, largely guided Japanese education until 1945, when they were massively repudiated.

Education was widespread for elite young men in the 18th century, with schools in most regions of the country. The subjects taught included Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Theology, Law, Astronomy, Metaphysics, Ethics, Medical Science and Religion.

The current system of education, with its western style and content, was introduced and founded by the British during the British Raj, following recommendations by Lord Macaulay, who advocated for the teaching of English in schools and the formation of a class of Anglicized Indian interpreters. Traditional structures were not recognized by the British government and have been on the decline since.

Public education expenditures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries varied dramatically across regions with the western and southern provinces spending three to four times as much as the eastern provinces. Much of the inter-regional differential was due to historical differences in land taxes, the major source of revenue.

Lord Curzon, the Viceroy 1899-1905, made mass education a high priority after finding that no more than 20% of India's children attended school. His reforms centered on literacy training and on restructuring of the university systems. They stressed ungraded curricula, modern textbooks, and new examination systems. Curzon's plans for technical education laid the foundations which were acted upon by later governments.

Organized education in Norway dates as far back as medieval times. Shortly after Norway became an archdiocese in 1152, cathedral schools were constructed to educate priests in Trondheim, Oslo, Bergen and Hamar.

After the reformation of Norway in 1537, (Norway entered a personal union with Denmark in 1536) the cathedral schools were turned into Latin schools, and it was made mandatory for all market towns to have such a school.

In 1736 training in reading was made compulsory for all children, but was not effective until some years later. In 1827, Norway introduced the "folkeskole", a primary school which became mandatory for 7 years in 1889 and 9 years in 1969. In the 1970s and 1980s, the "folkeskole" was abolished, and the "grunnskole" was introduced.

In 1997, Norway established a new curriculum for elementary schools and middle schools. The plan is based on ideological nationalism, child-orientation, and community-orientation along with the effort to publish new ways of teaching.

In Canada, education became a contentious issue after Confederation in 1867, especially regarding the status of French schools outside Quebec.

Education in New Zealand began with provision made by the provincial government, the missionary Christian churches and private education. The first act of parliament for education was passed in 1877, and sought to establish a standard for primary education. It was compulsory for children to attend school from the age of 6 until the age of 16 years.

In Australia, compulsory education was enacted in the 1870s, and it was difficult to enforce. People found it hard to afford for school fees. Moreover, teachers felt that they did not get a high salary for what they did.

In Imperial Russia, according to the 1897 census, literate people made up 28 percent of the population. There was a strong network of universities for the upper class, but weaker provisions for everyone else.

Vladimir Lenin, in 1919 proclaimed the major aim of the Soviet government was the abolition of illiteracy. A system of universal compulsory education was established. Millions of illiterate adults were enrolled in special literacy schools. Youth groups (Komsomol members and Young Pioneer) were utilized to teach. In 1926, the literacy rate was 56.6 percent of the population. By 1937, according to census data, the literacy rate was 86% for men and 65% for women, making a total literacy rate of 75%.

An important aspect of the early campaign for literacy and education was the policy of "indigenization" (korenizatsiya). This policy, which lasted essentially from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s, promoted the development and use of non-Russian languages in the government, the media, and education. Intended to counter the historical practices of Russification, it had as another practical goal assuring native-language education as the quickest way to increase educational levels of future generations. A huge network of so-called "national schools" was established by the 1930s, and this network continued to grow in enrollments throughout the Soviet era. Language policy changed over time, perhaps marked first of all in the government's mandating in 1938 the teaching of Russian as a required "subject" of study in every non-Russian school, and then especially beginning in the latter 1950s a growing conversion of non-Russian schools to Russian as the main medium of instruction.

Education in French controlled West Africa during the late 1800s and early 1900s was different from the nationally uniform compulsory education of France in the 1880s. "Adapted education" was organized in 1903 and used the French curriculum as a basis, replacing information relevant to France with "comparable information drawn from the African context." For example, French lessons of morality were coupled with many references to African history and local folklore. The French language was also taught as an integral part of adapted education.

Africa has more than 40 million children. According to UNESCO's "Regional overview on sub-Saharan Africa", in 2000 only 58% of children were enrolled in primary schools, the lowest enrollment rate of any region. The USAID Center reports as of 2005, forty percent of school-aged children in Africa do not attend primary school.

Today, there is some form of compulsory education in most countries. Due to population growth and the proliferation of compulsory education, UNESCO has calculated that in the next 30 years more people will receive formal education than in all of human history thus far.

Illiteracy and the percentage of populations without any schooling have decreased in the past several decades. For example, the percentage of population without any schooling decreased from 36% in 1960 to 25% in 2000.

Among developing countries, illiteracy and percentages without schooling in 2000 stood at about half the 1970 figures. Among developed countries, figures about illiteracy rates differ widely. Often it is said that they decreased from 6% to 1%. Illiteracy rates in less economically developed countries (LEDCs) surpassed those of more economically developed countries (MEDCs) by a factor of 10 in 1970, and by a factor of about 20 in 2000. Illiteracy decreased greatly in LEDCs, and virtually disappeared in MEDCs. Percentages without any schooling showed similar patterns.

Percentages of the population with no schooling varied greatly among LEDCs in 2000, from less than 10% to over 65%. MEDCs had much less variation, ranging from less than 2% to 17%.

Since the mid-20th century, societies around the globe have undergone an accelerating pace of change in economy and technology. Its effects on the workplace, and thus on the demands on the educational system preparing students for the workforce, have been significant. Beginning in the 1980s, government, educators, and major employers issued a series of reports identifying key skills and implementation strategies to steer students and workers towards meeting the demands of the changing and increasingly digital workplace and society. 21st century skills are a series of higher-order skills, abilities, and learning dispositions that have been identified as being required for success in 21st century society and workplaces by educators, business leaders, academics, and governmental agencies. Many of these skills are also associated with deeper learning, including analytic reasoning, complex problem solving, and teamwork, compared to traditional knowledge-based academic skills.James, Samantha. 'how education came about" (2014) retrieved from http://www.education.com

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".

Character amnesia

Character amnesia is a phenomenon whereby experienced speakers of some East Asian languages forget how to write Chinese characters previously well known to them. The phenomenon is specifically tied to prolonged and extensive use of input methods, such as those that use romanizations of characters, and is documented to be a significant issue in China and Japan. Modern technology, such as mobile phones and computers, allows users to enter Chinese characters using their phonetic transcription without knowing how to write them by hand. Whether or not the phenomenon is as widespread or troubling as some have claimed is the subject of debate.

Chinese characters are a logographic form of writing, where the form of the character is not always directly related to its pronunciation. The characters are composed of a combination of 8–11 standard strokes, over a hundred common radicals, and hundreds of phonetic components. The characters can be very complex and learning them is a highly neuro-muscular task, meaning that it is difficult to remember how to write the characters without repetitive practice in writing them by hand. Scientific studies have also shown that while reading utilizes diverse areas of the brain, reading Chinese makes unique usage of distinct parts of the frontal and temporal areas of the brain associated with motor memory, areas associated with handwriting.

Chinese character literacy in both China and Japan is taught by rote memorization, where schoolchildren become proficient at writing characters by writing them by hand repeatedly. As a result of people becoming less reliant on handwriting and more willing to use computer input methods, they are no longer exposed to the necessary reinforcement to retain the ability to write the characters. Those affected by character amnesia are still capable of reading text and visually recognizing characters, but are unable to write some characters by hand, usually those less frequently used, without the aid of an input method device such as a mobile phone or computer.

Some characters were forgotten by writers as reported by Confucius.

Until the 20th century, Chinese characters were written with brush and ink. In the early 20th century when the pen became the dominant method of writing in China and Japan, critics complained that the expressiveness of Chinese characters would be lost. Calligraphy is, however, still a thriving art form throughout East Asia.

In the 1980s electronic typewriters and later personal computers provided people in China and Japan an alternative to writing by hand. With the advent of the World Wide Web in 1991 and the subsequent widespread use of email, internet chat, and discussion forums, people began using computers to communicate with each other in Chinese and Japanese. Today, increased computer usage and the use of SMS text-messaging, especially among young people, means that a large portion of those people's everyday use of Chinese characters is done using input methods, not by hand. In a 2010 survey by Dayang Net, 43 percent of respondents said they use the computer all the time for their jobs and 43 percent said that they only write out characters by hand when filling out forms or writing their signature.

Some input methods are, in fact, related to the structure of the character, as opposed to those based on pronunciation. Cangjie is one popular example of such a structure based input method for Chinese. Input methods based on phonetic transcription which do not require the user to know how to write the character by hand are the most popular, because they are easier to use. In China, more than 97 percent of computer users enter Chinese characters using such a phonetic input method.

A parallel phenomenon has appeared involving the increased use of input methods to write Chinese characters and the difficulty of remembering such a large set of characters. The use of word processors allows the user to write using characters that the user does not remember how to write by hand. This resulted in the reappearance in the 1980s in Japan of complex older characters which had been removed from the official lists. The number of characters available for use on a word processor far exceeds the number of characters a person can readily remember how to write by hand. While many have blamed the use of input methods for difficulty remembering how to write the characters by hand, widespread use of input methods may be responsible for a reversal in the decline of kanji use in Japan.

Anecdotal evidence of character amnesia is plentiful, but there has been insufficient scientific study of the phenomenon. There are however a few surveys which reinforce the claim that reliance on input methods has caused those who communicate in written Chinese and Japanese to forget how to write many characters in general use which they previously were able to write from memory. An April 2010 survey conducted by "China Youth Daily" found that of the 2,072 respondents 83 percent reported having trouble writing characters. A similar Dayang Net survey found that 80 percent of respondents acknowledged having forgotten how to write some characters. In 2008 the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China conducted a survey of 3,000 teachers, where sixty percent complained of declining writing ability. Another anecdotal example can be seen during a spelling bee show hosted on CCTV in 2013, where only 30% of participants were able to write "toad" () in Chinese.

While some claim that phone text messaging is the primary cause of character amnesia, the phenomenon, at least in Japan, appears to originate with widespread use of word processors. An article in the "Asahi Shimbun" from 23 September 1985, reports that students were finding it increasingly difficult to remember how to write even quite simple kanji by hand since the full-scale introduction of word processors at a university campus in Isehara. A 1993 survey of members of the Information Processing Society of Japan found that habitual word processor users reported declining ability to write characters by hand. The Japanese term describes a person whose handwriting ability has deteriorated due to overreliance on computer input methods.

In China, the Ministry of Education has attempted to counteract the problem of character amnesia through the promotion of traditional Chinese calligraphy classes. The ministry's instructions include increasing the frequency of calligraphy classes for younger students to once every week and optional classes and after-school activities for older students.