EN
Chinese is a tonal language, thus the difference in the tone is directly linked to the word meaning. There are four tones in Mandarin Chinese. The sound pitch is as distinctive as the components of segmental phonemes of the syllabic structure. Different morphemes/words in the Chinese language can sound alike or the same. It is the combination of the components in the Chinese character which can indicate the meaning as well as partially or wholly the pronunciation. In the paper we discuss some radicals of the traditional writing system in the relation to the phonetic components (phonetic indicators) in the picto-phonetic characters (known also as phono-semantic characters). Whoever tries to learn the Chinese language as L2 has to approach the writing system in order to develop the vocabulary and the spoken Chinese language competence.