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Chinese written characters are fascinating in their ingenuity and originality. The earliest form of Chinese writing was pictographic – stylized pictures of objects. Graphic symbols supplemented pictographs to represent simple abstract thoughts. Later, for transmitting complex ideas, ideographs were created from already existing simple characters, conveying ideas by juxtaposition of interchangeable elements. To meet the demand for thousands of new characters, the Chinese resorted to phonetic or harmonic writing, relying on the radical for the sense and the phonetic for the sound.

If you would like to know more about Chinese characters, you can read “FUN WITH CHINESE CHARACTERS”.