Incidentally, the largest group of Chinese characters are phono-semantic e.g. encode both meaning and pronunciation. Over half of all Chinese characters are in that bucket. That actually allows speakers to have some ability to guess both pronunciation and meaning of characters they have never seen. There are rules to guide this.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C7%92u_bi%C4%81n_d%C3%BA_bi%...

▲

card_zero 4 hours ago | parent [-]

...in Standard Chinese only, other varieties having very different pronunciations, right?

	▲	adastra22 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In Classical Chinese actually. Mandarin, which I assume you mean, is not the language these characters were designed for. But it is related enough that the phonetic hints often (but not always) help.