Chinese has ~40,000 characters; you need a tenth to read

Chinese writing is famously vast. Britannica puts the inventory at roughly 40,000 characters, and the largest modern dictionary, the Zhonghua Zihai, records a staggering 85,568 — though most are rare historical variants almost nobody uses.

The practical number is far smaller. A literate Chinese reader needs to know perhaps 4,000 characters, and it’s commonly said that around 3,000 are enough for basic literacy — for example, to read a newspaper.

Studies in China indicate full literacy requires knowing roughly three to four thousand characters.

That gap exists because a logographic script doesn’t spell words from a small set of letters; each character is its own unit. Master a few thousand high-frequency ones and you can read almost everything in daily print, even while tens of thousands of obscure characters sit unused in the dictionary.