Chinese characters are the written symbols used in the Chinese language. Each character represents a word or a meaningful part of a word, rather than a sound like letters in the English alphabet. There are thousands of characters, and they can be combined to form phrases and sentences. The characters are often categorized into different types, such as pictographs, which are drawings of objects, and ideographs, which represent ideas. Learning to read and write Chinese characters can be challenging due to their complexity and the need to memorize many different symbols.