Hanzi is the name for the traditional Chinese characters used in the official written language of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese communities out of China. There are about 47,000 Hanzi characters, but many of them are unused. To be fully literate, you need to know about 4000 of these Chinese characters. Most Chinese words are written with multiple characters, one for each syllable.
Besides traditional Chinese there is also Simplified Chinese, an attempt to increase literacy in China. Simplified Chinese characters have less number of strokes than traditional Chinese. They are used in mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore.
