Romanization of the Chinese language, in particular, has proved a very difficult problem, although the issue is further complicated by political considerations. Another complication is the fact that Mandarin is perceived to be written non-phonetically, and this myth has retarded acceptance of romanization efforts. Because of this, many romanization tables contain Chinese characters plus one or more romanizations or Zhuyin.
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Ideogrammic compounds
會意字/会意字 huìyìzì
Translated literally as logical aggregates or associative compounds, these characters symbolically combine pictograms or ideograms to create a third character. For instance, doubling the pictogram 木 mu "tree" produces 林 lin "forest", while combining 日 rì "sun" and 月 yuè "moon", the two natural sources of light, makes 明 míng "bright".
Xu Shen estimated that 13% of characters fall into this category.
Some scholars flatly reject the existence of this category, opining that failure of modern attempts to identify a phonetic in a compound is due simply to our not looking at ancient "secondary readings", which were lost over time.For example, the character 安 ān "peace", a combination of "roof" 宀 and "woman" 女, is commonly cited as an ideogrammic compound, purported motivated by a meaning such as "all is peaceful with the woman at home". However, there is evidence that 女 was once a polyphone with a secondary reading of *an, as may be gleaned from the set 妟 yàn "tranquil", 奻 nuán "to quarrel", and 姦 jiān "licentious".
Adding weight to this argument is the fact that characters claimed to belong to this group are almost invariably interpreted from modern forms rather than the archaic forms, which as a rule are quite different and often far more graphically complex. However, interpretations differ greatly between sources.
