How are characters constructed?

Some Chinese characters are pictograms, like 象 for elephant, 日 for sun, 月 for moon, and 木 for tree. However, this is a very small category of characters. Other characters are ideograms, which are iconic illustrations, like 上 for up and 下 for down. Another category of characters is ideogrammic compounds, which entails the symbolic combination of pictograms or ideograms in order to create another character. For instance, 明 combines the pictograms for two natural light sources, the sun and the moon, in order to create the character for bright. And 林, the character for forest, is a combination of two trees.

The category with the most characters is phono-semantic compounds, which are composed of two parts: a pictograph, which indicates the general meaning of the character, and a preexisting character which suggests the pronunciation of the character. For instance, 架 (jia), which can mean a frame or a shelf, is composed of 加 (jia) to indicate the sound and 木 (mu), which means tree, to show that it’s made of wood. Many of the simplifications adopted by the PRC also replaced the phonetic part of a character to make it simpler. For instance, the word 戰 in traditional script, 战 (zhan), which means battle, has the sound component of 占 zhan and the meaning component of 戈 (ge) which is a lance. This system makes it possible to memorize the thousands of different characters necessary in order to be literate in Chinese.