The Structure of Chinese Characters

Now in modern Chinese there are more than 50,000 characters in total,All of them can be put into three types.They are pictographs,ideographs,and radical-phonetic compound characters.

Pictographs(象形字)
The earliest characters were pictures. such as the sun(日), the moon(月), the mountain(山),the water(水) and so on. Such characters were known as pictographs. Some of them are still in use even today.

Ideographs(会意字)
An ideograph is combining two or more elements with meanings of their own ,to form a new meaning.Such as the ideographs”休”, it is mean a person relying on the tree.

Radical-phonetic Compounds(形声字)
More than 80% of characters are formed radical-phonetic compounds. They are formed this way: a meaning element plus a phonetic element. Such as ”病(bìng)”(disease)= 疒(illness) + 丙(bǐng).