You are right. When years ago apple was said to introduce "emoji", the arstechnica article I was reading was explaining what the hell emojis are. They were like " it is a pictographical language like Chinese or hieroglyphic where each "idea" is represented by a single picture" and I simply could not wrap my head around it...

Do I have to learn a new language altogether? How ? Will it fit on a keyboard? How many ideas can there be? What if I have to say something longer? What if I have to say a difficult concept?

This was "before" emoji came out on iOS.

Rest is history