[tasogare]

> It doesn't fit at all into the phonics description given in this article because you can't sound out a character.

You are wrong, it absolutely does. 放方芳房肪舫防紡 are all pronounced fang and contains 方. This stems from the evolution of the script, where a character was used to write various words with the same or close pronunciation. Then those characters where extended with other parts to reduce polysemy. This is similar the determiner of other logographic scripts (hieroglyphic, cuneiform) except the determiner is embedded in the character themselves instead of being separate ones.

While this phenomenon is less reguglar than in an alphabetic script (not that English has a straight graphemes/phonemes mapping either...) because of the script evolution , it’s happening nonetheless and is quite useful. So it’s not true to say that you can’t guess the sound of a character, because in a lot of case it’s possible to get an approximation.

[fiblye]

Not sure why you're downvoted. You're absolutely right.

I'm only a year into learning Chinese, but I can often guess the sound of a new character just by recalling components of similar characters. The tone takes memorization, but the sound oftentimes has hints. Especially if it's a complex, uncommon character--almost always the sound derives from one of the common radicals it uses.

It's not as intuitive as, say, pinyin, but it's helpful and straight up taught by any decent Chinese textbook.

[tgb]

I do this guessing while trying to read an unknown charger but this article made me question the usefulness of that and is exactly why I'm unsure what the process in Chinese should be. Doing this looks more like the cueing process of picking a word with the right starting letter that matches the rest of the sentence and moving on. I certainly don't learn the word by seeing it a couple times in text.