CJK characters

In internationalization, CJK is a collective term for the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, all of which use 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 CJK characters often include, hànzì in Chinese, kanji, kana in Japanese, hanja, hangul in Korean, and Hán tự, Chữ Nôm in Vietnamese.

Character repertoire

Chinese is written almost exclusively in Chinese characters. It requires approximately 4,000 characters for general literacy, but up to 40,000 characters for reasonably complete coverage. Japanese uses fewer characters — general literacy in Japan can be expected with about 2,000 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.