But with many single characters in Chinese, a Chinese person will tell you, if you ask for what a single character means, something like, "Well it's not so easy to pin down the meaning of that one. Sometimes we use it like this, and sometimes like that."

Sure, some characters have an easy meaning (for me, I think the rice in Mi is one of them!) but there's plenty where you cannot get a Chinese person to easily tell you what a single character means. I guess it's a little like, but not the same as, asking an English person to tell you, what any given "morpheme" (word part, like fac-) means. Hahaha. Not a perfect analogy tho! :)

Here's this list of morphemes I found just now thinking about this: https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/16294/urlt/morpheme...

Seems incomplete list when you consider etymology of English words are often composed of parts from ages past! :)

little rice

Yes.

But it's more complicated than that.