"In fact, most Chinese characters are not pictures of anything."
Originally, most of them were pictures. Around 2000 yrs ago, they were simplified into "Clerical script", and many lost their pictorial resemblance. When new phonetic characters were created (i.e. one component semantic, the other phonetic) there were many choices of what to use as phonetic (e.g. any of 体提替etc could have been chosen for righthand side of "ti" to sneeze) and the one providing the most semantic clues is often chosen.
Another example of "ti" with mouth radical is 啼, meaning "to cry". The 帝 on the right (actually "di", close enough) looks like an eye (立) with tears flowing down (冖 and 巾).
I believe the reason I've had character amnesia as a foreign learner of Chinese in the past is because I was initially never shown how to "spell" characters into their components. One of the first characters I learnt was 喜 in 喜欢. I was told to practise writing it many times over until I knew it. But I needed to learn it as being spelt as 士口八一口 before I could remember it easily.
I know the ancestors of Chinese characters were pictures but not the current characters (with a few unconvincing exceptions). Most of the characters now are "phono-semantic compounds".
Not to be offensive or anything but those "oh they picked that cause it looks like this" stories are bullshit. In my opinion at least. Take the example you chose 啼. That also means "wild animal cry". How does that help the picture theory? And even if this one story happens to be true, how does that explain all the other thousands of characters?
I understand that you're trying to apologize for the Chinese writing system. But there is no need. It just sucks. Horrible, hard-to-use designs are cobbled together all the time, the Chinese character system is just a particularly prominent example.
Now for a quote from David Moser's Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard speaking about learning a French word.
And voila! I've learned a new word, quickly and painlessly, all because the sound I construct when reading the word is the same as the sound in my head from the radio this morning -- one reinforces the other. Throughout the next week I see the word again several times, and each time I can reconstruct the sound by simply reading the word >phonetically -- "a-mor-tis-seur"
Originally, most of them were pictures. Around 2000 yrs ago, they were simplified into "Clerical script", and many lost their pictorial resemblance. When new phonetic characters were created (i.e. one component semantic, the other phonetic) there were many choices of what to use as phonetic (e.g. any of 体提替etc could have been chosen for righthand side of "ti" to sneeze) and the one providing the most semantic clues is often chosen.
Another example of "ti" with mouth radical is 啼, meaning "to cry". The 帝 on the right (actually "di", close enough) looks like an eye (立) with tears flowing down (冖 and 巾).
I believe the reason I've had character amnesia as a foreign learner of Chinese in the past is because I was initially never shown how to "spell" characters into their components. One of the first characters I learnt was 喜 in 喜欢. I was told to practise writing it many times over until I knew it. But I needed to learn it as being spelt as 士口八一口 before I could remember it easily.