There are so-called phono-semantic compound characters [1] which consist of two other characters, a part indicating its meaning, and one part indicating its reading. This has helped me tremendously while memorizing the readings of Japanese kanji - and guessing the readings of unknown characters does work incredibly well after you have learned the most common ones which are used as components in more complex characters.
As a very simple example, 仲 is a combination of 人 (person) and the reading of 中 and means relation, relationship (which is vaguely indicated by the human character).<p>You are correct, though: This is not failsafe and characters can have multiple readings or lack this phono-semantic notion altogether (also, since the characters are originally Chinese it doesn&#x27;t work as well in Japanese, I believe), but I think it is the closest thing to guessing a word&#x27;s pronunciation that these languages offer.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chinese_character_classification#Phono-semantic_compound_characters" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chinese_character_classificati...</a>