We study the physical aspects of the chiral Schwinger model, comparing the content of this theory to that of the vector-like case. The theory is analyzed by bosonization with special attention to charged sectors and aspects of symmetry breaking. A generalized model with different left and right couplings is analyzed and the currents coupled to the gauge fields are shown to be conserved by using the equations of motion. The effects of the anomaly are studied and the mechanisms by which a new massless particle is introduced in the physical spectrum of the chiral model are clarified. We find that the longitudinal mode of the gauge field, acquiring dynamics because of the anomaly, is responsible for restoring the cluster property of chirality-carrying operators. The physics of the Wess-Zumino term is clarified and the equivalence between the theories with and without the Wess-Zumino term is spelled out. We construct the Hilbert spaces of the theories with and without the W-Z term and the physical subspaces are shown to be the same, with positive definite metric in both cases. The Ward identity Z₂ = Z₁ is shown to hold in the theory (without the W-Z term) despite its lack of local gauge invariance.