Chinese characters
Characters are a kind of graphic language, much different from languages that use an alphabet such as English. The correct way to tell between them is to remember the structure and meaning of every character, not pronunciation, because there is a very close relationship between meaning and structure of characters. Example: 房(house)=户+方. 房 is a shape-pronunciation character. 户 is for shape and 方 is for pronunciation. 户 means 'door'. 房 means 'A person lives behind a door'. 方 pronunciation is fang and tone is 1, and with the tone mark it is written as fāng. 房 pronunciation is also fang, but tone is 2, with the tone mark it is written as fáng.