While Chinese is somewhat like you described, there are complexities. Some words take their meaning as a group of words, so telephone is "electricity talking". In Japanese (which uses the Chinese Han characters, along with the phonetic Hiragana and Katakana) the "no" Hiragana is used to signify possession (so "Hikaru no Go" means "Hikaru's Go"); this is also used for boy "man no child" and girl "woman no child".<br><br>Additionally, Chinese characters can be combined into a single character to create a concept. Thus, a mountain on top of a mountain signifies outside, three trees form a forest, and virtue is "a strong action of limiting or containing the plentifulness of the ego (heart)". Here, some words/characters take on their ideographic form (representing an idea) over their pictographic form (representing something as a styalized drawing).