One of the earliest forms of writing which is still being used today is Chinese characters, or hanzi. The image that many people have of Chinese characters is that they are all pictograms, but this is far from the case because pictograms have very limited use. Simple pictograms might be practical, for example, if one is making a shopping list of items to buy at the store, but they are fairly useless if one is writing something more complex or abstract. So it is a mistake to assume that written Chinese is a "picture language"．
Besides pictograms, there are simple ideograms. These are characters which provide an abstract picture of an idea, but in an often easily recognizable form. For example, "up" is "上" while "down" is "下". While the meanings of many ideograms are not this easy to work out, they tend to be simple, easy-to-remember characters which are commonly used.
Next we have a common category of hanzi: compound characters. These are where elements of two or more characters are combined in one character for a new meaning. Some of these are easy to understand. In many cases, however, the meanings of compound characters are more difficult to work out.
Phonetic loan characters are the characters which started out as pictograms. However, they were often used to mean other words that had the same pronunciation. A good example of this is "目". While it can be used in modern Chinese with the meaning "eye", it is most often used to mean "an item on a list". The reason was that Chinese had a word for "an item on a list" but lacked a character for it, so the word took the character "目", a character with the same pronunciation.
A final category of Chinese characters is by far the most common. These are phonetic-semantic characters. With phonetic-semantic characters, one element of each character gives a clue to the pronunciation, while the other gives a clue to the meaning.
Over the centuries, Chinese characters have continually been developed, with a trend towards the simple and more abstract. It was thought that the complexity of some Chinese characters was keeping people from being able to learn them. Thus, during the 1950s and 1960s, the Chinese government rolled out simplified Chinese characters.
