Chinese characters
Nobody knows exactly how many Chinese characters there are, but the biggest Chinese dictionaries list about fifty thousand characters, even though most of them are only variants of other characters seen in very old texts. For example, the character 回 (huí) has also been written as the variant characters 迴，廻，囬，逥，廽，and 囘, although most Chinese people only know and use the variant 回. Studies in China show that normally three to four thousand characters are used in daily life, so it is safe to say that someone needs to know three to four thousand characters to be functionally literate in Chinese, or be able to read everyday writing without serious problems.