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The ‘dai kan wa jiten’ or ‘great Kanji-Japanese dictionary’, is considered to be the biggest collection containing around 50,300 kanji characters. In 1981 the Japanese government introduced a list of 1,945 basic kanji for general use plus 166 special characters used only for people's names. Educated Japanese can usually recognize between 2-3,000 kanji glyphs. Despite the challenges presented by the script, the overall literacy rate in Japan is very high at over 99 percent of the population.
The ratio of kanji content to the whole text varies from about 20% to 30%, depending on the material researched, though this figure tends to be diminishing these days, basically reflecting the growing adoption of katakana particularly for English loan words.
Japanese was traditionally written vertically from right to left; which facilitated writing with a brush in the right hand while continually unrolling a scroll with the left. More recently, horizontal text has become increasingly common, again basically as a result of the influence of English.
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