Chinese character - Simple English Wikipedia

# Chinese character

### From Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading.

Chinese characters are symbols used in writing Chinese and Japanese. In the past, Korean and Vietnamese also used them. The beginning of these characters was at least 4000 years ago.

Chinese characters are ideograms — they mainly represent ideas instead of sounds. Most earlier Chinese characters were pictographs - simple pictures used to mean words, but few modern Chinese characters are pictographs. Many modern Chinese characters are a combination of two or more simple characters.

Chinese characters are an important part of East Asian culture. Chinese characters may be considered to be abstract art, because of how the characters are made up of lines and points.

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Category: Writing systems

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