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A Chinese character is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese, sometimes Korean, and formerly Vietnamese. Four percent of Chinese characters are derived directly from one individual pictogram, but most characters are pictophonetics, characters containing two parts where one indicates a general category of meaning and the other the sound. There are approximately 50,000 Chinese characters in existence, but only between three and four thousand are in everyday use.
 According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie (2650 B.C.), a bureaucrat under the legendary emperor, Huangdi. The legend tells that Cangjie was hunting on Mount Yangxu(today Shanxi) when he saw a tortoise whose veins caught his curiosity. Inspired by the possibility of a logical relation of those veins, he studied the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth, and the stars in the sky, and invented a symbolic system called zì----Chinese characters. It was said that on the day the characters were born, Chinese people heard the devil mourning, and saw crops falling like rain, as it marked the beginning of the world.
Actually, the oldest Chinese inscriptions that are indisputably writing are the Oracle bone script, a well-developed writing system dating to the late Shang Dynasty (1200 -1050 B.C.).
The oracle bone inscriptions were discovered in 1899, at what is now called the Yin Ruins near Anyang city. A few are from Zhengzhou and date to an earlier period in  the dynasty, around the sixteenth to fourteenth centuries B.C., while a very few date to the beginning of the subsequent Zhou dynasty. In addition, there are a small number of logographs found on pottery shards and cast in bronzes, known as the Bronze script, which is very similar to, but more complex and pictorial than the Oracle Bone Script. These suggest that Oracle Bone Script was a simplified version of more complex characters used in writing with a brush; no examples of writing with ink remain, but the Oracle Bone Script includes characters for bamboo books and brushes, which indicate that they were in use at the time.
 The early stages of the development of characters were dominated by pictograms, in which meaning was expressed directly by a standard diagram. The development of the script, both to cover words for abstract concepts and to increase the efficiency of writing, has led to the introduction of numerous non-pictographic characters.
The various types of characters were first classified by the Chinese linguist Xu Shen, whose etymological dictionary Shuowen Jiezi(说文解字) divides the script into six categories, the liùshū (六書/六书): 1) pictograms (象形字 xiàngxíngzì); 2) pictophonetic compounds (形聲字/形声字, Xíngshēngzì); 3) ideographs (指事字, zhǐshìzì); 4) logical aggregates (會意字/会意字, Huìyìzì); 5) associative transformation (轉注字/转注字, Zhuǎnzhùzì); and 6) borrowing (假借字, Jiǎjièzì). While the categories and classifications are occasionally problematic and arguably fail to reflect the complete nature of the Chinese writing  system, the system has been perpetuated by its long history and pervasive use. Chinese characters in compounds, belonging to the second or fourth group, make sense profoundly when components of each compound are combined meaning wise. For example, 教 (jiāo) for "teaching" is a compound of 孝 (xiào) for "filial piety" and 父 (fù) for "father," with the result indicating that the essence of education is meant to teach about one's filial piety and respect towards his or her father. From this, many believe that Chinese characters, originally related to oracles in the late Shang Dynasty, were created through some kind of divine revelation.
 1. Pictograms (象形字 xiàngxíngzì)
Contrary to popular belief, pictograms make up only a small portion of Chinese characters. While characters in this class derive from pictures, they have been standardized, simplified, and stylized to make them easier to write, and their derivation is therefore not always obvious. Examples include 日 (rì) for "sun," 月 (yuè) for "moon," and 木 (mù) for "tree."
There is no concrete percentage defining the proportion of modern characters that are pictographic in nature; however, Xu Shen estimated that 4 percent of characters fall into this category.
 2. Pictophonetic compounds (形声字， Xíngshēngzì)
Also called semantic-phonetic compounds, this category represents the largest group of characters in modern Chinese. Characters of this sort are composed of two parts: a pictograph, which suggests the general meaning of the character, and a phonetic part, which is derived from a character pronounced in the same way as the word the new character represents.
Examples are 河 (hé) river, 湖 (hú) lake, 流 (liú) stream, 冲 (chōng) riptide, 滑 (huá) slippery. All these characters have a radical of three dots  on the left, which is a simplified pictograph for a water drop, indicating that the character has a semantic connection  with water; the right-hand side in each case, is a phonetic indicator. For example, in the case of 冲 (chōng), the phonetic indicator is 中 (zhōng), which by itself means middle. In this case it can be seen that the pronunciation of the character has diverged from that of its phonetic indicator; this process means that the composition of such characters can sometimes seem arbitrary today. Furthermore, the choice of radicals may also seem arbitrary in some cases; for example, the radical of 貓 (māo) cat is 豸 (zhì), originally a pictograph for worms, but in characters of this sort indicating an animal of any sort.
 Xe Shen placed approximately 82 percent of characters in this category, while in the Kangxi Dictionary; the number is closer to 90 percent, due to the extremely productive use of this technique to extend the Chinese vocabulary.
3. Ideograph (指事字, zhǐshìzì)
Also called a simple indicative, characters of this sort either add indicators to pictographs to make new meanings, or illustrate abstract concepts directly. For instance, while 刀 (dāo) is a pictogram for "knife," placing an indicator in the knife makes 刃 (rèn), an ideogram for "blade." Other common examples are 上 (shàng) for "up" and 下 (xià) for "down.”This category is small, as most concepts can be represented by characters in other categories.
4. Logical aggregates (會意字/会意字, Huìyìzì)
Also translated as associative compounds, characters of this sort combine pictograms to symbolize an abstract concept. For instance, 木 (mu) is a pictogram of a tree, and putting two 木 together makes 林 (lin), meaning forest. Combining 日 (rì) sun and 月 (yuè) moon makes 明 (míng) bright, which is traditionally interpreted as symbolizing the combination of sun and moon as the natural sources of light.
5. Borrowing (假借字, Jiǎjièzì)
Also called phonetic loan characters, this category covers cases where an existing character is used to represent an unrelated word with similar pronunciation; sometimes the old meaning is then lost completely, as with characters such as (zì), which has lost its original meaning of nose completely and exclusively means oneself, or 萬 (wan), which originally meant scorpion, but is now used only in the sense of ten thousand.
This technique has become uncommon, since there is considerable resistance to changing the meaning of existing characters. However, it has been used in the development of written forms of dialects, notably Cantonese and Taiwanese in Hong Kong and Taiwan, due to the amount of dialectal vocabulary, which historically has had no written form and thus lacks characters of its own.
The use of traditional characters versus simplified characters varies greatly, and can depend on both the local customs and the medium. Because character simplifications were not officially sanctioned and were generally a result of caoshu writing or idiosyncratic reductions, traditional , standard characters were mandatory in printed works, while the (unofficial) simplified characters would be used in everyday writing, or quick scribbling. Since the 1950s, and especially with the publication of the 1964 list, the PRC has officially adopted a simplified script for use in mainland China, while Hong Kong, Macau, and the ROC in Taiwan retain the use of the traditional characters. There is no absolute rule for using either system, and often it is determined by what the target audience understands, as well as the upbringing of the writer. In addition, there is a special system of characters used for writing numerals in financial contexts; these characters are modifications or adaptations of the original, simple numerals, deliberately made complicated to prevent forgeries or unauthorized alterations.
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