You can often guess meaning or sound from the character.<p>E.g. 海, 洲, 流 (sea, continent, flow) all have three dots on the left indicating they relate to water.<p>And 领, 玲, 铃 are all pronounced ling due to the 令 component.<p>Characters that aren&#x27;t widely used you don&#x27;t need to learn to write, and reading is much easier than writing. If you see a big complicated character in a noodle-y context you pretty much know it&#x27;s going to be biang.<p>If you don&#x27;t know the pronunciation of a character it&#x27;s not too far from not knowing the meaning of a random English word like &quot;kaiserin&quot;, apart from being slightly harder to guess pronunciation on average.