We know how it probably is pronounced and some about its meaning. There are 6 different methods how the Chinese characters are constructed. This is often made in Chinese. The character for wheat therefore comes to mean both wheat and arrive. Today it means only arrive and wheat have been given a new character.
Most Chinese words consist of two or more characters.
This makes is much easier to learn Chinese since you often already has learnt one of two of the characters in a new word. There are two sorts of Chinese characters in use today, traditional and simplified. They did also discuss if the should remove all characters and start to use western letters instead. Luckily they decided to simplify the characters instead. The reason they wanted to simplify them was that China at that time had a great number of illiterates.