[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.