Most Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds, which are kinda a bit of a mix between phonographs and ideographs

This is a good thing. The pictographic basic characters tend to have the pronunciation you learn by rote, but then they become the components of the the phono-semantic characters.

With the phonosemantic characters one side tells you the rough pronunciation, the other side gives you a ballpark e.g. 火 is fire (imagine a burning campfires) 包 is pronounced bao and then if you add 火 fire to 包 you get {炮|pao} meaning cannon. If you add the bamboo radical over 同 tong you get {筒|tong} meaning a barrel. So 炮筒 paotong means the barrel of a cannon.

Many Chinese words are made up of two characters, so by context you can have a decent guess what they mean.