system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
Chinese characters (which also includes Japanese ones since they are taken from chinese ones) are truly fascinating and the best thing about learning them is realising why they were created.

Us speakers of languages with alphabets think that the most obvious and simple way to represent words is take a symbol for each sound... but this was a thing that happened late in human history; the most obvious way to write words is simply drawing a picture of what you're talking about.

Sun? 日　but sun can be also used to mean day so you can use 1 symbol for multiple things.

Then you make a symbol for person 人; maybe then you make a symbol for tree 木. Then you need to invent a symbol for "rest" but you don't want to invent a whole new symbol for every damn concept so what about drawing a man leaning against a tree to represent "rest"? 休　.

Then the symbol for tree can be modified to represent only a specific part of the tree, like the roots maybe. 本　

Maybe you can extend the meaning of the roots symbol to indicate "origin" in general. Coupled with the symbol for sun you get 日本　 which indicates "the origin of the sun" so the "land of the rising sun". That's the symbol for Japan.

Then you want to indicate the people of Japan; easy, just take the symbol for Japan+person 日本人　"Japanese person/people".

The coolest thing about Chinese characters is their immediately recognisable meaning once you start learning more and more of them; you can instantly understand what a word means without ever having heard it before. You can also sort of understand vaguely a chinese text even if you know only Japanese and vice versa since the symbols represent words and concepts and (generally) not sounds (sometimes they do).
gpt
That's very interesting. Thanks kind stranger