Since the time the first character dictionary was created (around 200 B.C., in China), Chinese characters have been traditionally classified into 5 categories:

1. The Pictograph, which is a picture of a physical object, and usually quite simple: the sun (), the moon (), a tree (), a horse (), an eye (), a woman (), fire ()... Today, most characters in this categories (a few dozens only) require a lot of imagination to see the actual picture of what it represents. However, when knowing the origin of the character and its evolution, it is much easier to see that picture. This category also includes characters representing a symbol more than an actual object. For instance the character for one () is sometimes said to describe one finger and sometime describing the single stroke unit symbol, one.
   
   
2. The Ideograph, which is usually a small combination of characters from the first category to describe a concept, or an idea. For example, a dot on top of an horizontal bar () will describe the idea of up, upper or on top of (). Similarly, the same dot below the same horizontal bar () will describe the idea of down, or go down (). Similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Chinese character-based writing system is not an ideaographic one, as less than 2% of all characters fit in these first 2 categories.
   
   
3. The Agregat, which is a combination of simple elements (which are usually real characters themselves), which, providing a little story, gives life (and therefore meaning) to the character. For example, the cereal () element together with the fire () element means fall () because fall is the season when cereal have the color of fire. Add a heart () to the fall () element and you get the meaning of sadness (), as in my heart,  fall is a sad season. Another example is the character meaning east. Take the sun (), and place it behind a tree () and you get east (), the direction where the sun rises behind the trees. Take an eye (), add death () and you get a character meaning blind (). This sounds like another very cool approach to learn these characters, but unfortunately, only 8% of all Chinese characters fit in these first 3 categories.
   
   
4. The Phonetic-Ideograph, which is a combination of a semantic element with a phonetic element. For example to form the character for mosquito (), which is pronounced BUN in Japanese and WEN in Chinese, take the character for insect () as the ideographic/semantic element, and add a phonetic element that is pronounced the same as the word mosquito (, BUN in Japanese and WEN in Chinese). Here, the meaning of the phonetic element () is not relevant (the character means cultural). This category represents about 85% of all Chinese characters and is therefore the largest, by far.
   
   
5. The Phonetically borrowed character, which include characters which are used for their sound only, typically country names (and therefore is different in Japan and China). America is written in Japan with the kanji that means rice (, pronounced MEI in Japanese) and in China with the characters that means beautiful (, pronounced MEI in Chinese). France with the Japanese kanji that means Buddha (, pronounced FU) and the Chinese character that means law (, pronounced FA). England with the Japanese kanji and the Chinese character that means excellence (, pronounced EI in Japanese and YIN in Chinese).

In Japan, there is a 6th category for characters that were created in Japan and do not exist in China. These are referred by the Japanese as Kokuji (), the characters () of our country ().

Although this classification is very interesting from a historical stand point and make great theses subjects for university students and other scholars, its heterogeneous repartition (85% of all Chinese characters are phonetic-ideographs, with one semantic element and one phonetic element) makes it difficult to use in a modern world.

The following page, proposes a more modern approach for classifying characters based on their structure, rather than their origin.