Two kinds of writing languages Only few written languages are logographs. The (traditional) Chinese character is the most representative example. Usually there is no clear clue to pronounce a Chinese letter by looking the letter itself. In other words, to learn Mandarin Chinese people need to learn both phonetic and writing systems of Chinese characters. These two systems are somewhat independent, which makes this language difficult to learn for foreigners. Phonograms, by contrast, maybe more easy to handle because generally people know how to pronounce an unfamiliar character if they already know the phonetic system of the language.