hieroglyphics Chinese writing is hieroglyphic.

In classical Chinese (文言 wenyan) recorded one single word hieroglyph. For example: 名 min - name, title. In modern Chinese, the word can be written to one or two, sometimes three or more characters: 历史 Lishi - history, 百科全书 bayke quanshu - Encyclopedia (literally "complete book hundred disciplines").
In order to freely read the press and popular literature, requires knowledge of 3-4 thousand characters - about the need to know the full graduate from high school in China. To read specialized literature enough understanding 5-8 thousand characters. Minimum level of literacy for farmers is 1500 characters for workers and employees - 2000 characters. The total number of characters is very large - several tens of thousands.
Characters have a clear structure. In the II-I millennium BC has developed a list of basic symbols (graphemes), which are still used as separate characters, and also part of the more complex characters. Graphemes consist of certain features (horizontal, vertical, folding, with the angle with a hook point) which are written in a specific order. Examples of graphemes: 口 kou - mouth, 手 show - hand.

However, about 90% of the characters are so-called fonoideogrammami. They generally consist of two (or more) graphemes, one of which indicates the estimated read (phonetic), and the other - to the value (key). For example, the word "Mom» 妈妈 mama, consisting of two characters, the character 妈 ma includes two grapheme: 女 Nu - woman (key, indicates the approximate value) and 马 ma - horse (phonetics, reading indicates an approximate). There are characters, ideograms, where grapheme, members thereof, indicate only the value. For example, the character 好 hao - well, consists of grapheme 女 Nu - woman and zi 子 - child: the woman who gives birth to children, it's good.
In the 50-ies of XX century in China began work on simplified characters with complex writing. In 1964 was published to accompany the list, numbering about six thousand characters. Examples of complete and simplified characters: 国 - 国 of (state), 说 - 说 sho (talk), 树 - 树 shu (tree). In China, now commonly used simplified characters. However, reading old books requires full knowledge of hieroglyphics. In Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore also still common writing complex characters. Despite the fact that the principles of simplification is often intuitive, it is worth learning two types of writing.
Used for transcription Pinyin phonetic alphabet Zimu 拼音 字母, based on the Latin alphabet and diacritical marks.
Thanks hieroglyphic writing, you can read texts written centuries ago. You can also read the literature of other countries, where it was distributed or still used Chinese characters (old Korean and Vietnamese texts Japanese texts, etc).