[yaix]

With the advantage of phonetic languages, that you can read new words that you have never seen before. Impossible in Chinese. (Probably the reason that everybody but China has made the switch from symbolic to phonetic at some point in the past few milenia).

[cglee]

Have you heard of "radicals"? You can guess what a Chinese character means without being able to pronounce it.

[CWuestefeld]

I have heard this claim. But in practice, with real Chinese people trying to read an unfamiliar character, I've never seen it actually work.

In English, we'd try to break out prefixes and suffixes, and come up with "some kind of disease", or "something to do with the heart". But in my experience watching Chinese people, unfamiliar characters just get a "dunno".

Could it be that the difference I'm seeing is because of the use of simplified characters rather than traditional? Maybe simplified characters have cleaned out some of the clues.

[pradocchia]

No, that's right. The best you can hope for is that you recognize the phonetic (typically the right or lower element of the graph), and match it to a word you already know from context. At best the radical is just a hint, a way to distinguish between multiple uses of the same phonetic character.

[cleaver]

One other thing is that the character gives no clue as to intonation. (EG. "ma" can be "mother", "horse", "to scold" or other meanings depending on the tone.)

[CWuestefeld]

That's OK. My voice gives no clue as to intonation, either. This is extraordinarily difficult for westerners to master (or to even hear at conversational tempo, in my opinion).

[ced]

You're a native speaker, right? Can you really see a new character and be confident about your guess? I usually think "This is probably a Zhi, but it might be a Ji, too, or something else entirely." Granted, some characters, like animals, are easier.

[cglee]

Yes, native Chinese speaker, though English is my best language. I think you can guess based on context as well. Not precise as you'd like, but not a blank slate either.

[pavel_lishin]

Sure, but you can't call up your friend on the phone and ask him what it means. (Not without having to explicitly describe the glyph, anyway.)

[cglee]

Yes you can. Complex characters are usually made up of many foundation characters, so you could describe it to your friend that way.