That's incredible. I don't know Chinese, but aren't kanji combinations of characters, and that's how they get their meaning? Like a drawing of a man over a surfboard would mean "surfing," or something like that? I see two identical characters on the top of the last one flanking a middle one.

Not quite, but something like that.

Kanji is a component of written Japanese; the three main components are Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. All three ultimately come from the Chinese writing system, it's just that Hiragana and Katakana underwent a huge amount of changes and simplifications and discarding of details to arrive at what they are now. Kanji are almost all directly from Chinese hanzi (which is the only vital component of the Chinese writing system; stuff like bopomofo is unnecessary, and is only a pronunciation/learning guide) aside from some that were created in Japan.

Uh, I can only really explain this from the perspective of Chinese, but there's really not that much difference.

Hanzi are not hieroglyphics, to start with. They're not pictograms. The simpler, older ones were meant to resemble what they named, but eventually the writing system developed and evolved and that's not really the case anymore; it's not pictures, it's general concepts that combine to create more precise meaning.

Now, for a bit more clarity, a single character is completely self-contained and you're not allowed to break it apart without destroying its meaning. A character is not composed of other characters per se; it's sort of built from other characters, but modified, and melded together. There's these things called "radicals" that are common and, to an extent, limited; enough so, at least, that Chinese dictionaries list characters by their radical.

Uh, examples would be better, unfortunately I don't have any images to go with it... plus I haven't read or written Chinese in years, I'm very rusty.

Okay we got a basic character, read mu4 and means "wood" or "tree." Now if you were to write two of them together, but thinner, close together, and grouped as one character, the new character is read lin2 and means "forest." This is very basic, and very literal.

On the other hand we have the word ren2 which means "person." It also forms the basis for a very common radical, which is also written with two strokes, but the slant on the right becomes a vertical line, and it's much thinner; it goes on the left side of a character. Gah... I've forgotten so much... trying to think of an example...

Okay, nothing comes to mind. How about this one: xin1, which means "heart." When written flatter and put at the bottom of a character, it becomes a radical that adds the concept of thinking or feeling to a word. For example the word xiang3 for "think" is written with that radical, and an I-forget-what on top (this is all stuff I could probably recognize, but for the life of me I don't remember how to write it). Wang4 "to hope," same radical.

A lot of times the other, non-radical part of a character indicates nothing but the sound of the character. The radical adds the concept, the meaning to it - see, spoken Chinese came before written, so if someone were to say this word everyone would know what they're talking about, but when it came time to write it down, they simply chose another character that sounded like it and put a radical on it that related to the meaning of the word.

Uh, that was kind of rambling, complicated, didn't make much sense... I really have forgotten a lot of my Chinese. Oy.

Oh hurr. I've come from the boat of Traditional Chinese. Go Taiwan. >>;

But too bad I haven't studied it for a while and I'm starting to forget them. <<;

However, I'm not to big on simplified because I see Chinese words as pictures, and I felt a little silly when "love" in simplified was missing a heart. xP

...spoken Chinese came before written, so if someone were to say this word everyone would know what they're talking about, but when it came time to write it down, they simply chose another character that sounded like it and put a radical on it that related to the meaning of the word.

This is particularly interesting.

So Chinese has a large set of indivisible characters with essential meanings, called radicals, which you can use to build more complex characters with new meanings? (I thought I heard knowing 10,000 Chinese characters is enough to be literate, 50,000 to be a scholar.)

...spoken Chinese came before written, so if someone were to say this word everyone would know what they're talking about, but when it came time to write it down, they simply chose another character that sounded like it and put a radical on it that related to the meaning of the word.

This is particularly interesting.

 

So Chinese has a large set of indivisible characters with essential meanings, called radicals, which you can use to build more complex characters with new meanings? (I thought I heard knowing 10,000 Chinese characters is enough to be literate, 50,000 to be a scholar.)

Why is it interesting? I'd imagine that's true of all languages. When a language was first developed, it's purpose would have been to verbally communicate ideas more clearly than just grunts and gestures. Writing would become important later, when people wanted to keep track of what has been said.

As for the second part... oy, I'm not very good at explaining. It's sort of like that, but sort of not. The part called the radical is only part of a word, and some of the simpler words don't necessarily have them (dictionaries list the simpler words by one stroke).

It's really not easy to explain especially since I've forgotten so much but it does make sense, trust me on that one.

...spoken Chinese came before written, so if someone were to say this word everyone would know what they're talking about, but when it came time to write it down, they simply chose another character that sounded like it and put a radical on it that related to the meaning of the word.

This is particularly interesting.

 

So Chinese has a large set of indivisible characters with essential meanings, called radicals, which you can use to build more complex characters with new meanings? (I thought I heard knowing 10,000 Chinese characters is enough to be literate, 50,000 to be a scholar.)

Why is it interesting? I'd imagine that's true of all languages. When a language was first developed, it's purpose would have been to verbally communicate ideas more clearly than just grunts and gestures. Writing would become important later, when people wanted to keep track of what has been said.

You hit it on the head: that's why it's interesting. It's true to the essence of language.

I have people I can talk to about Chinese, so don't sweat it. Thank you .