In English we can say river, stream, or creek for those long, narrow, flowing bodies of water.  In Chinese we have chuan , he ,  jiang , and shui .  Chuan really looks like a river, doesn't it?  When the character for water (shui) is used as a radical in a character, it is compressed into.  Canal is qu , which also contains the radical for water.  You will find that other bodies of water frequently contain the water radical, such as in hu (lake) or hai (sea).

Look at the characters before you look at their meaning.  Try to see if you can recognize some of these radicals in their names.

The Altai Mountains, or A'erti Shan, are in Xinjiang province.  The first two symbols make the sounds "a" and "ehr" but don't mean anything in this case.  Can you spot the character for shan?
Bo Hai, commonly translated as Bo Gulf, is northwest of the Yellow Sea.  Both characters in the name have the water radical.  The right-hand character means "sea," and has a distinctive double-box figure each containing what I imagine to be a water droplet.
Chang Jiang is commonly known as the Yangtze River.  Can you see the character for river?
Da means "big." The ba character refers to an old state which was in the general vicinity where Sichuan province is now located. What does shan mean?
You know what da and shan mean.  The middle character, bie, means to separate.  Dabie Shan separates Hubei province from Henan and Anhui provinces.
Dayun He is not really a river, but a canal.  It is known as the Grand Canal and it connects the Yellow River and the Yangtze.  As you've seen, da means "big" and he means "river."  The middle character, yun, contains the radical that means cloud (yun) and is used to indicate pronunciation.
Dong, the character on the left, means "east."  Hai means "sea."  Hence we have Dong Hai, translated as the "East China Sea."  Makes sense, eh?
The characters to the right are Dongting Hu.  So why isn't the character for east, dong, used?  Well, in this case, you will notice that the dong character does contain the water radical.  The other symbol means "together" or "alike" and simply tells the reader how the word sounds (dong).  The middle character, ting, means courtyard, but again it is only used for pronunciation purposes as far as I can tell.  Do you know what hu means?  Do you see the water radical?
The third character in Hainan Dao, dao, means "island."  Do you recognize the first two characters?  Compare them with the place shown immediately below.
The first character, nan, is a directional word.  Do you know which direction it is (see the provinces section).  The second character, hai, has the water radical and is discussed above.  Nan Hai translates to "South China Sea."
Many of us know this landform as the Amur River.  The translation of this word (at least the way I figure it) is so cool.  The first character, hei, means "black."  The second character, long, means "dragon."  The third character means "river," as you probably recognized.  The Chinese name for Amur River translates as "Black Dragon River."  I should point out that the traditional symbol for dragon is much more complicated, but also has that curly tail.
Huang hai means "Yellow Sea."
What do you think Huang He means?
In other parts of this presentation I have mentioned that tian means "heaven," "sky," or "day," such as in Tiananmen  (Heavenly Peace Gate) Square. You probably recognize the shan character.  Tian Shan translates as "heavenly mountains."