[est]

Native speaker here. Other comments are not wrong but not complete.

There are several phases of Chinese (the text) learning

1. Mapping your daily voices to phonics and to the characters

2. Expand your vocabulary with phonic tools like PinYin

And the most important part:

3. Learn new words and meanings without any involvements of phonics at all.

Many native speakers can comprehend the concept of a word at young age and when they have grown up and put those words into speeches they found they have the wrong pronunciation or word order. LOL. Chinese words are ideograms and can be linked to "pictures" without proper pronunciation. Also Chinese is analytic language so people can literally guess its meaning from contexts.