The current document is directed to methods and systems for identifying symbols corresponding to symbol images in a scanned-document image or other text-containing image, with the symbols corresponding to Chinese or Japanese characters, to Korean morpho-syllabic blocks, or to symbols of other languages that use a large number of symbols for writing and printing. In one implementation, the methods and systems to which the current document is directed carry out an initial processing step on one or more scanned images to identify a subset of the total number of symbols frequently used in the scanned document image or images. One or more lists of graphemes for the language of the text are then ordered in most-likely-occurring to least-likely-occurring order to facilitate a second optical-character-recognition step in which symbol images extracted from the one or more scanned-document images are associated with one or more graphemes most likely to correspond to the scanned symbol image.