[anrakushi]

Apparently too many character.. so continued on.

Chinese has two writing systems, simplified and traditional. Basically they are just as they sound, simplified are simplified versions of the traditional characters. eg 乐 (simplified) 樂 (traditional) same meaning, for all intents and purposes same character. However there are some differences between the meanings of Traditional and Simplified but lets not dive into that. Simplified is used in Peoples Republic of China (China), Traditional is used in Republic of China (Taiwan) and the Cantonese regions of the Peoples Republic of China. To have a decent reading and writing ability you should be able to read and write around 3000-4000 with more being understood in the higher educated and those involved in scholarly pursuits.

Japanese has 3 scripts. one is known as kanji and is essentially Traditional Chinese characters with some characters having been simplified and others are Japanese created characters. There are 1945 official general use characters, all of which you should learn. Of course there are some 50,000 characters as there is in Chinese but there is no need to learn this many. the highest test in Japanese for kanji is around 6000 i think. the other 2 scripts are phonetical scripts and are quite easy to learn