>>11672010Because Chinese characters tend to be made up of smaller characters themselves. For example, the image you posted uses a character that refers to an arc. At the same time, those character can be divided into ? and ? which mean "bow" (as in a bow and arrow) and melon respectively. This can be confusing if you see a symbol such as this, because there are other words that use those smaller symbols as well, e.g. ?.
You could always use these smaller symols --fadicals-- themselves, but they tend to take up more space and require more strokes to write than the average western symbol, and for those that don't they tend to be easy to get lost in other numeric symbols.
