The article presents an analysis of the Chinese charactery features as an ideographic writing system, its differences from phonographic writing systems familiar to students who learn Chinese as a foreign language and its influence on the characters teaching methods. The purpose of the article is to prove that the Chinese language writing specificity affects the teaching methods, thus, these features should be taken into account in the educational process. The subject of the research is relevant to society needs in studying Chinese which increases interest to Chinese language teaching methods, their theoretical and practical researches. Despite the fact that the interest to the subject is constantly growing it is still not sufficiently developed. Since the basic unit of writing is a language sign, it is proposed to structure ideographic and phonographic writing systems differences in terms of the three branches of semiotics - syntactic, semantics and pragmatics. The author notes that the challenge in Chinese writing acquisition is associated not only with characters complexity or number, but also with the fact that students perceive the characters as an addition and duplication of transcription – and often there is no perception of the character as a sign and understanding of ideographic writing system as a result. The article concludes that the ideographic writing as a writing system stands out from other modern languages writing which all refers to its phonographic writing system. So, the choice of the Chinese character teaching methods should be based on its features (usually associated with a form, semantics and pragmatics of an ideographic sign).