The uniqueness of Chinese characters ...

Against the backdrop of the long-standing Chinese civilisations, the Chinese characters, written as 汉字 (in Simplified Chinese) or 漢字 (in Traditional Chinese) are so unique, significant and profound that they are even used in the Japanese and Korean Language, where they are referred to as Kanji (漢字) and Hanja (漢字) respectively.

The most significant and amazing thing about Chinese characters is that the same character can be pronounced in as many different ways as there are number of dialect groups in China. Every dialect group pronounces the same character quite differently.

For example, in the first picture, the character, "黄" is typically used as Chinese surname, which means yellow, and it can be pronounced as Huang, Wong, Wee, Ng etc. depending on your dialect group or which province one comes from in China. The Japanese and the Koreans would pronounce it differently, too.

The second picture displays two characters, "安康" which collectively means peaceful and healthy. They can be pronounced as An Kang, On Hong, An Kong etc. depending on the dialect group again. Literally, it means that a Chinese newspaper can be read and understood by every Chinese but the characters in the newspaper are pronounced differently from province to province.