Unicode characters necessary for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese

Question

I\'m trying to answer these basic questions without getting a degree in linguistics and early human history, which seems to be where every google search has lead.

Answer 1

You can approximate such lists by looking at the appropriate Unicode properties (in particular, the "Script" of each character), but this does not fully reflect actual character use.

A better indicator would the character sets that have already been defined for fonts for those languages (e.g., Adobe-Japan-1-6, Adobe-GB-1-5, and Adobe-Korea1-2) described in this tech note (the exact character sets are defined separately). The CMap files should allow you to translate them back into Unicode code points.