Ideogramology 表意文字学 (continued 1):

From the perspective of orthography (character creation), some modern Chinese characters are purely ideographic characters. Some of them have obvious meanings. For example, one stroke (一）”yi” means the number “one”, two strokes (二）”er” means the number “two”, 不”bu” =””not, 好 “hao “ = “good”, and put two characters together  “孬” “nao” means “bad”, etc.  But there are not many of these characters (about 4%) in modern Chinese. The pure ideographic characters have not been seen from modern Chinese fonts, but they can be seen in ancient Chinese scripts. For example, In oracle bone inscriptions, the word “water” 水 ，”shui” is like running water and the word “seeing” 看 (kan) is like a wide-open eye.

In modern Chinese characters, there are few purely ideographic characters(纯表意文字). Most of the ideographic characters (表意文字) are both semantic and phonetic. This type of character is composed of form-side (形旁) (semantic part, a radical) and sound-side (声旁). The form-side (radicals, on the left side) represents the meaning (ideographic) and the sound side (phonetic, on the right side ). But the phonetic side of the word can be also an ideographic word when it is used to represent the phonetic. However, characters can also have the phonetic component on the top while the semantic component is on the bottom. At other times, the phonetic component may appear on the inside of the character while the semantic component is on the outside or vice versa.

Modern Chinese characters and/or “Hanyu Pinyin” can also be called syllable texts, with one syllable per character. Chinese characters are ideographic and phonetic texts and are also called “phono-semantic characters.