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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Michael Tree" data-source="post: 833957" data-attributes="member: 1455">That's not strictly true.  Only about 10% of Chinese characters are actually pictograms, physically depicting what they mean.  The rest are a combination of phonetic and pictographic.  Basically, to depict an abstract or complex word, the character of a homophone (another character that is pronounced the same way) is used, with another character stuck next to it to signify a meaning.To create an example in English, say the character % represents the word 'fly', meaning an insect.  To create the verb 'to fly' you might use % with the pictogram for 'wings' next to it.  To create the character for 'fly' meaning 'zipper' you might use % with the character for 'clothes' next to it.  Such symbols are further complicated as the years when on, as complex symbols were added to other complex symbols, and so on.  A lot of linguistic drift has also occured since the characters were first standardized, so what used to be homophones are no longer.  To make it even more complicated, different characters achieved their final standardized forms at greatly different times, so characters created in 1500 AD might be loosely homophones, but not at all when compared to ones from 200 BC.Another common misconception is the belief that most chinese characters are words.  Most Chinese (well, Mandarin and Cantonese, anyway) words have two syllables, and different unique characters are used for each syllable.  These characters may have a meaning in the dictionary, but are never used in isolation.To use an example from English, if English used a Chinese-esque system, we might have a character 'er', defined in the dictionary as 'family member' to write the final er in Mother, Father, Brother, Sister.  But we couldn't talk about 'ers'.  It's meaningless except in combination with other characters.A third misconception is that all asian languages are related.  Some certainly are (chinese dialects, vietnamese, thai, and others), but Chinese and Japanese are about as closely related as English and Japanese.  Japanese is completely unrelated to Chinese and English, but has borrowed a lot of words and writing systems from both.  English is more closely related to Hindi and Tamil than Chinese is to Japanese, while Japanese is more closely related to Hungarian and Finnish than it is to Chinese.</blockquote>

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