Here are a few of the simplest kanji.
It’s no coincidence that these were all originally pictograms, which is a fairly rare category of Chinese character compared to phono-semantic compounds.
My Germanic mind, of course, wants to put them together to make things easy: “oh, we can spell swordsman 刀人!” But actually swordsman is 剣士.
I also start to wonder if we could loan 人 into the English language as a shorthand symbol, like how we took etc. from Latin.
口 mouth
田 rice paddy
刀 sword
人 person
内 house
木 tree
米 rice
石 stone
水 water
川 river