It is often said that every Chinese character is a picture, but only a couple hundred are actual pictographs. Some of these are still interpretable, such are tree木,but most are now written in a way that is hard to immediately discern their meaning ,such as horse "ma"or bird "niao".There are also a very small number of simple ideographs which suggest an abstract idea directly like one "yi". All the rest of Chinese characters are combinations of these pictographs and simple ideographs.
Around 100 A.D the scholar "xushen"wrote the etymological dictionary "shuo wen jie zi"which differentiates six types of characters. First are these pictographs "xiang xing zi"and simple ideographs "zhi shi zi"，which are collectively know as "wen". These characters combine to create two additional types of characters, logical aggregates "hui yi zi"and phonetic complexes "xing sheng zi".Logical aggregates combine the meanings of different characters to create a new meaning, e.g. a female"nu"child "zi"is good "hao".Phonetic complexes combine the meaning of one character with the sound of another, e.g. in the meaning of one character with the sound of anther, e. g. in the character "xiang"the meaning of think is suggested by hear "xin"and the pronunciation is nearly the same as that of "xiang".The final two types of characters represent transformations in the meanings of these first four types. Associative transformations "zhuan zhu"extend the meaning of a character to a related concept. Borrowings "jia jie"give an unrelated meaning to a character ,generally that of a spoken word which has the same pronunciation as the borrowed character but lacks its own character.
In xushen's dictionary ,reputedly 4%. of the characters are "xiang xing zi"and 1% are "zhi shi zi",while 13% are "hui yi zi"and 82% are "xing sheng zi"(later scholars argue many of these also have an element of "hui yi"). So it is very inaccurate to call Chinese characters pictographs. But as the main building block for creating all characters, pictographs are essential to Chinese.
