The Chinese Orthography

The Chinese orthography, whose origins can be traced to a period some 4,000 years ago, is logographic, with each character representing a syllable and, at the same time, either a full word, or a minimal unit of meaning (morpheme, as in the image above, the two-syllable, two-morpheme word hanzi, from han Chinese and zi character). Each character is drawn with a number of strokes, applied in a particular order. Full literacy in Chinese requires the knowledge of about 5,000 characters, but the number of characters in the language is much larger.
Chinese writing was initially pictorial, a characteristic which was lost by the second century C.E. The script used today was shaped around the fourth century C.E.
In the 1920s and 1930s the complexity of Chinese orthography was portrayed as an obstacle to literacy and integration into the modern world. Alphabetical writing, the most efficient type of writing, was not suitable for Chinese and would threaten the cultural unity of the country with its many dialects. While words are pronounced very differently in those dialects, they are written the same, a feature that would be eliminated with alphabetic writing that would require different spelling for the same word in each dialect. That idea was abandoned in favor of simplification of the traditional script, which was done by reducing the number of strokes used for individual characters. Most characters nowadays are composed with fewer then ten strokes. In the 1950s and 1960s lists of simplified characters were adopted throughout mainland China, and in 1957 Pinyin, a Latinized alphabetic system used for special purposes, was introduced in order to increase literacy and assist in the promotion of Beijing Mandarin as the national language in the People's Republic of China. The Chinese view writing as an art and as a means of preserving their rich culture and history, thus Pinyin has always remained a supplementary system, used for assistance in pronunciation for language learners, indexing systems, computation, Chinese words in the non-Chinese media, street signs, etc., and was not promoted as an official substitute for the traditional orthography.
Chinese script was adapted by neighboring countries like Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. Nowadays, Vietnamese is written in the Latin alphabet, and Korean in its own script (hangul, used since the fifteenth century). Japanese is still written in kanji (Japanese for hanzi) characters, each one representing syllable, although a Latinized system, Romanji, is employed in circumstances similar to those of Pinyin.
Below is the word ma, horse, in traditional (nine strokes) and simplified (three strokes) forms: