In Chinese, most characters are built out of roughly 100 “building blocks.” I designed a program on my computer and then started prioritizing the most common and useful building blocks.

Now this was and still is an unusual view because Chinese—with its 75,000 individual characters rather than an alphabet—had historically been the language considered incompatible with modern ...

Yet this regulated list of common characters was implemented across society in education and teaching, press and publishing, information processing, computer fonts, Chinese reference books, and more.

The Council for Cultural Affairs issued a draft to review the Joyo Kanji Table, or the national list of Chinese characters in common use, (established in 1981 with 1,945 designated Chinese ...

Mandarin Chinese is the most common language in the world, estimated to be spoken by more than 1.2 billion people in countries like China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia.

We decided to survey high-school third graders because this age group’s percentage of enrolling in high schools was as high as 98% and they are expected to read all Chinese characters in the ...