Chinese written character. One of the oldest continually used writing systems to date. Characters are ideographic, meaning that they
represent the meaning of the word, as opposed to phonetic, which means you will not be able to learn how to speak Chinese just by reading it. Hanzi is used to write Chinese, Japanese, to some extent in Korean, and
Vietnamese until the
occupation of France.
Since one has to
memorize thousands of hanzi, it is very
difficult to read Chinese.
Because so many
homophones exist in Chinese, due to the fact that every word only has one syllable, the Chinese cannot simply stop writing hanzi.