The basic composition of Chinese characters can be put into a few categories. The two you see most prominently are the symbolic model and the pronunciation plus meaning model. I'm sure that you will be able to find more extensive descriptions online, but I feel it would be more interesting if I described these two. The pictographic model is quite plain. A lot of simple words were created by simply drawing the item in question. For example: ⇒山 mountain ·⇒日 Sun ⇒月 moon ⇒口 mouth Characters created with the other model known as semantic-phonetic compounds make up a large part of all Chinese characters. For example, 铜(Copper= metal（钅）+ pronunciation (同 tóng) Hope you enjoyed that. For the next issue, I'll write about pinyin and how it can be used to guide you in pronouncing Chinese.