answers: tens of thousands
context: ; a list with English translations may be found at: "Structure of four character idioms". Chengyu Chengyu () are a type of traditional Chinese idiomatic expression, most of which consist of four characters. Chengyu were widely used in Classical Chinese and are still common in vernacular Chinese writing and in the spoken language today. According to the most stringent definition, there are about 5,000 chengyu in the Chinese language, though some dictionaries list over 20,000. Chengyu are considered the collected wisdom of the Chinese culture. Through the insights learned from chengyu, you'll discover the experiences, moral concepts, or admonishments from </s> famed Han dynasty scholar Xu Shen classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, including many of the simplest characters, such as "rén" (human), "rì" (sun), "shān" (mountain; hill), "shuǐ" (water). Between 80% and 90% were classified as phonetic compounds such as "chōng" (pour), combining a phonetic component "zhōng" (middle) with a semantic radical (water). Almost all characters created since have been made using this format. The 18th-century Kangxi Dictionary recognized 214 radicals. Modern characters are styled after the regular script. Various </s> system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use in East Asia, and historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users. Chinese characters number in the tens of thousands, though most of them are minor graphic variants encountered only in historical texts. Studies in China have shown that functional literacy in written Chinese requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters. In Japan, 2,136 are taught through secondary school (the "Jōyō kanji"); hundreds more are in everyday use. Due to
question: how many chinese letters are in the alphabet