The basic elements of the Chinese
writing system. 漢字, known as hànzì in
Chinese, kanji in Japanese, hanja in Korean, and Chu nho (Chữ nho) in Vietnamese.
Each character is made from a number of strokes and contains one "radical" which is used as a key for dictionary lookup. The radical can be anything from a single stroke on simple characters, to what appears to be an entire "sub character" in complex characters composed of several simpler characters crammed into a one-character space.
In complex characters there are often different pieces which serve different functions. One piece may serve to provide meaning and another may serve as a pronunciation hint. These sound hints are generally a simple sub-character with the same or similar sound to the character of which they are part. Unfortunately many of these sound relationships are ancient and because this was a subtle feature, the sounds or pronunciations of the complex character and the sub-character hint have diverged over the centuries to the point where they are now too obscure to help a learner. To linguists they do provide valuable etymological information however.
There are several types of characters: pictograms/pictographs,
ideograms/ideographs, and phonograms/phonographs.