A language, in general, consists of sentences, which are made up of words, which in turn are constructed from characters. A character can be considered as a symbol, and the geometric aspects of the symbol are discussed here as a graph.

Unlike English, Chinese characters are so-called square pictographs or ideographs. The following is shown as a comparative Chart of Chinese and English.

Chinese characters can be analyzed into one or more components 部件[bù jiàn]. The simplest case is those characters of only one component, i.e., 獨體字[dú tǐ zì] simple characters. These early-formed characters were made to represent the syllable in speech directly using the outward appearance of the things that they stand for.

Most Chinese characters consist of more than one component, i.e., 合體字[hé tǐ zì] compound characters. For example, the characters 柑([gān], mandarin orange) and 森（[sēn], thick forest） are made up of two (i.e., 木 and 甘) and three (i.e., three 木) components respectively.