Different from Western characters, Chinese characters are square and indicate either pronunciation or meaning or both. Chinese characters provide a convenient tool for imagery thinking, and thus most Chinese people are good at imagery thinking.

For instance, Chinese characters indicate meaning with grapheme, which enable readers to interpret without real understanding. According to the pictographic radical of a character, people can approximately guess its meaning. If we see the radicals of  (tree), (bird) or  (grass) when reading, we may know that these characters indicate a kind of tree, bird or grass.

Chinese way of thinking features much experimentalism, and people tend to have an overall idea of an object based on experience. This way of thinking helps to handle the opposites in a contrary, making Chinese people get accustomed to antithesis. For instance, the prose and poesy in ancient China often matched both sound and sense in two poetic lines.

In ancient woodblock printing, some characters were engraved on a quadrate board, and arranged in the order of from the upper to the lower, right and left. A character took up a small pane, and all characters were placed on a big pane. Chinese people regarded symmetry and rhythm as the criteria of beauty, and made the characters and the whole appear square. This characteristic of Chinese characters has much to with Chinese traditional way of thinking.

Most Chinese characters are phonograms, and their grapheme reflects not only the meaning but also the pronunciation of word elements. This kind of comprehensive word formation that indicates both pronunciation and meaning exerted much influence on the thinking patterns, and made Chinese people be more adept at synthesis. Ancient Chinese employed the golden mean to handle conflicts, that is, they conceded to each other and took the method of compromise and harmony to solve problems. The juxtaposition of pictographic and phonetic radicals embodies the golden mean of Chinese people.