Liushu refers to the six types of writing, namely Xiangxing (pictographic), Zhishi (indicative), Huiyi (ideographic), Xingsheng (phonographic), Zhuanzhu (switching explanations) and Jiajie (phonetically borrowed).

Xiangxing (pictographic) characters are picture-like scripts which are easily to be associated with the concrete things or abstract things they indicate. For instance, sun is written as ; eyebrow,  (eye  and brow ); and so on.

Zhishi (indicative) refers to the type that employs a special sign to indicate an object or a concept. The indicative sign is either added to a part of a single-element character or a special location in a sign that indicates an object. For instance, the character 上 (above) has a horizontal stroke to indicate the horizontal line, and it indicates the concept of above the horizontal line.

Huiyi (ideographic) combines two or more single-element pictograms or indicative characters that can match each other to indicate a new meaning. For instance, the character  (follow) combines two  (person) to mean that one person follows the other.

Xingsheng (phonographic) characters are composed of two components, with one indicating the sound and one, the meaning.

Zhuanzhu (switching explanations) creates a new character from an old one to differ between words with the same meaning but with slightly different pronunciation.

Jiajie (phonetically borrowed) borrows a character from a word that is pronounced equally but has a totally different meaning.

Many scholars of literature believe that only the first four types are the ways of forming Chinese characters and the last two are the methods of using Chinese characters.