Chinese is a logographic language, using thousands of characters. Ancient Chinese characters have evolved into the Chinese writing forms used today. This article will introduce you some characters of Chinese writing, such as compound words, the direction of writing, as well as giving examples of some interesting uses of Chinese writing.

Oracle Bones
The discovery of the oracle bones in China goes back to 1899, when a scholar from Peking had been prescribed a remedy containing "dragon bones" for his illness: "dragon bones" were widely used in Chinese medicine and usually refered to fossils of dead animals. The scholar noticed some carvings that looked like some kind of writing on the bones he acquired from the local pharmacy. This lucky find led eventually to the discovery of Anyang, the last capital of Shang dynasty where archeologists have found an enormous amount of these carved bones. The inscriptions on these bones tell us that by 1200 BC Chinese writing was already a highly developed writing system which was used to record a language fairly similar to classical Chinese.

Bronze Inscriptions
The next stage in the history of Chinese writing is the bronze inscriptions (jinwen). These are texts caved into bronze vessels. These vessels became widely used during the Eastern Zhou dynasty.

Beginnings of Modern Writing
Starting from about the fifth century BC, we begin to find writings on bamboo strips. Before writing the characters on the bamboo surface with a hard brush or a stick, the strips were prepared in advance and tied together with strings to form a roll.

What is the standardization of writing in ancient China?
A major event in the history of Chinese script is the standardization of writing by the First Emperor of Qin who unified China in 221 BC. Before that time, each of the many states in China had their own style and methods of writing. The First Emperor introduced the Qin script as the official writing and from there on all the unified states had to use it. The writing style of this period is the lishu which is easily readable today even to the inexperienced.

What are characters of Chinese writing?
The Chinese writing system is an open-ended one, meaning that there is no upper limit to the number of characters. The largest Chinese dictionaries include about 56,000 characters, but most of them are out of date, in obscure or rare formations.

Usage
Characters can be used on their own, in combination with other characters or as part of other characters.

Strokes
A character may consist of between 1 and 64 stokes. The strokes are always written in the same direction and there is a set order to write the strokes of each character. In dictionaries, characters are ordered partly by the number of stokes they contain.

Notes
The 39-stroke character means "the sound of thunder" and is always written doubled. The 48-stroke character means "the appearance of a dragon walking".

Homophones
There are approximately 1,700 possible syllables in Mandarin. As a result, there are many homophones - syllables which sound the same but mean different things. These are distinguished in written Chinese by using different characters for each one.

Homophonic words to Chinese ears sound different. To Western ears however they all sound the same. These syllables can be distinguished in speech from the context and because most of them usually appear in combination with other syllables.

If you look closely, you will notice that some of the characters above have parts in common. These parts give you a clue to how to pronounce the characters.

Simplified characters

What is the direction of writing?

Traditionally Chinese was written from right to left in vertical columns. The first publication in Chinese using horizontal (left to right) text was Robert Morrison's Dictionary of the Chinese language, published in 1815–1823 in Macau. When written in vertical columns, Chinese is generally read from top to bottom, right to left. When written horizontally, as on a shop sign, it is usually read from left to right, though older signs (on temples, for example)

may read from right to left. From the early 20th century made horizontal texts more popular.

Since 1949 horizontal writing has become the standard in the PRC, and all PRC newspapers changed from vertical to horizontal text in 1956, though some headlines are written vertically, as are inscriptions of signs on most state organizations.

The horizontal writing of Chinese is normal in Singapore, and it has been gradually adopted in Hong Kong, Macao and in overseas Chinese communities since the 1990s.

What is the use of Chinese characters for other languages?
Chinese characters are used to write Modern Standard Chinese, which is based largely on spoken Mandarin. Other varieties of Chinese, especially Cantonese, are sometimes written with Chinese characters, or with a combination of characters and words in the Latin alphabet.

Chinese characters have been used to write Japanese and Korean and Vietnamese. They are still used in written Japanese, in combination with hiragana and katakana, and to a much lesser in written Korean, while Vietnamese is now written with the Latin alphabet.

How to get the meaning of an unknown word?
Generally, upon meeting an unknown character, one looks at the uppermost or leftmost element for some clue to its meaning. There are a number of standard 'heads' and sides (radicals) that indicate general categories like the 'Grass' radical for plants (other than trees) or the 'Walking' radical for movement. The words for 'to flee' and 'peach' are homophones. Both characters are composed of two components: 'Peach' has a 'wood' radical on the left, while 'flee' has the walking radical; both of these two words share a common element on the right, indicating the pronunciation. If you can figure out the meaning of “桃”(peach), but you know the word “to flee”, then you can get not only the meaning of the word but also the pronunciation.

Each character generally corresponds to a single sound or 'syllable' in spoken Chinese, which means that even a relatively short line of dialogue, can span the entire screen. While each character can have an intrinsic meaning, many 'words' are short phrases consisting of multiple characters and similar phrases can have widely different meanings. For example, Huo che (lit., Fire car) means 'train' while Jiou huo che (lit., Aid fire car) means 'fire truck.'

How are the dictionaries organized?
As the language lacks an alphabet, Chinese dictionaries tend to be organized by stroke number and the radicals mentioned earlier (as well as other commonly used elements), though the index may also use the sound, often in pinyin. Ironically, this can make simple characters harder to look up.