[elgenie]

Chinese characters are hieroglyphs: they don’t have any relationship to their pronunciations.

For example, 火, the character for fire, is a (slightly) stylized brushstroke picture of a fire.

Mutually unintelligible communications that use the same pictures are distinct languages, but there are political implications to acknowledging this, so they’re “dialects”. As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

[barry-cotter]

Less than 500, probably less than 200 characters are like that. Most are composed of a sound component and a meaning component, except there has been over a thousand years for sound shifts to render the sound component misleading.

If you want to learn more the Wikipedia article is a great place to start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters