Comment by dnautics

it's hard to quantify as most? (i don't even know maybe 1000 or so characters) but a lot of them do have semantic component. Sometimes it's a bit obfuscated because simplification (either the pinyin instituted by the PRC or other simplifications, like jyoyo instituted by the japanese in the 19th? century) destroyed semantic meaning by fusing roots, or totally deprecating characters and replacing with unrelated characters that sound the same.