Note that in Chinese, character is not the same as word.
Most modern Mandarin words are bisyllabic, and represented by the combination of two characters, and their meaning does not necessarily derive in a straightforward way from the meanings of their constituent characters (for example, the word for "thing" is composed of the characters for "East" and "West" in conjunction)
Most modern Mandarin words are bisyllabic, and represented by the combination of two characters, and their meaning does not necessarily derive in a straightforward way from the meanings of their constituent characters (for example, the word for "thing" is composed of the characters for "East" and "West" in conjunction)