Chinese writing is not ideographic. While a myth has advanced throughout language study that Chinese characters are ideographic, or represent ideas, this is not true. Chinese writing, like all other written language systems, use symbols to represent morphemes if not individual words. Morphemes are the smallest unit of grammatical language which cannot be broken down into smaller sections.
Chinese writing started out as pictures of actual objects, such as people, animals, plants, etc. However, over the years, the pictographs became more stylized and thus no longer look like the objects they once represented. In order to increase literacy, the Chinese government has simplified about 2,000 commonly used characters to make them easier to write and read.
Chinese writing contains a large number of homophones (words that sound alike but mean different things). In order to represent the differences in meaning, each word is given a distinct character so that it appears different in writing, similar to adding the 'w' in order to differentiate between the words "whole" and "hole."
Chinese writing can be written in two different directional formats. Vertical, the older method, reads from top to bottom, traveling from right to left. The horizontal method is similar to that used in English: left to right and top to bottom. Both methods are still in use today, although the horizontal method has been steadily gaining in popularity since the 1990s.