section_path: Literacy and lexicography
section_name: Literacy and lexicography
paragraph_text: Literacy and lexicography
  
  The memorisation of thousands of different characters is required to achieve literacy in languages written with them, in contrast to the relatively small inventory of graphemes used in phonetic writing. Historically, character literacy was often acquired via Chinese primers like the 6th-century Thousand Character Classic and 13th-century Three Character Classic, as well as surname dictionaries like the Song-era Hundred Family Surnames. Studies of Chinese-language literacy suggest that literate individuals generally have an active vocabulary of three to four thousand characters; for specialists in fields like literature or history, this figure may be between five and six thousand.