I (Marco Cimarosti) wrote:

> As you can imagine, the Chinese T.H. are much more numerous than the
> Japanese T.K. If I recall correctly, the whole set is about
> 7,000 characters (vs. about 2,300 in Japan), and the elementary
> subset is about 2,000 characters (vs. about 800 in Japan).

Sorry, my figures where quite wrong!

The "List of characters frequently used in modern Chinese" only includes
3500 characters, of which 2500 are to be taught in the elementary school and
the remaining 1000 in the secondary school. (source: Yin Binyong, John
Rohsenow, "Modern Chinese Characters", Sinolingua, Beijing, 1997)

_ Marco