[mytailorisrich]

English is written using an alphabet. Alphabets are by and large phonetic so you do not need to remember how to pronounce every word, you learn to read the alphabet and specific spelling (e.g. 'th' in English) and you are mostly done.

Chinese is written using ideograms ('kanji' in Japanese), which convey a meaning but not a pronounciation. So when you encounter a new character you cannot pronounce it.

[coffeeling]

> Chinese is written using ideograms ('kanji' in Japanese), which convey a meaning but not a pronounciation. So when you encounter a new character you cannot pronounce it.

This isn't quite true - about 80% of Chinese characters are so-called phonosemantic compounds, where people originally started using the character for one thing for another thing whose word sounded similar (say, emoji for "can", as in able to) and then adding a semantic component to differentiate the character from other similar-sounding ones. In Chinese, they smushed the two components into the space of one character, but in eg. Egypt, they simply wrote whe semantic clarifier and the phonetic hint side by side, full size.

That is, the majority of the characters are primarily sound-based, it's just that the connection between a character and its sound is shoddy, even in Chinese languages.

Japanese kun readings for native words do divorce the characters pretty completely from their sound.

[mytailorisrich]

This is being pedantic.

You cannot guess the pronunciation of a character from the way it is written. At most the "phonosemantic compound" might provide a clue to possibly reduce the space of possibilities.

[coffeeling]

It's not pedantic in that the characters themselves really are sound-based and provide a pretty decent clue. That said, it's still just a clue, and there are multiple similar pronunciations associated with any phonetic component, so it's still guesswork in the end.

[mytailorisrich]

And so we are back to square one: it is not possible to know how to pronounce a character by looking at it (and any clues are not "decent" in the majority of cases), as opposed to alphabetic systems...