The individual components of associative compounds represent meaning. In the pictophonetic characters, some components represent the character’s meaning and others represent its pronunciation. For example, “财(cai)”, “帐(zhang)”, “货(huo)” all have the character “贝” (bei) and all have meanings related to money. Actually, “贝” (bei) means “shell”, and in ancient China, people used shells as money. So many Chinese characters related to money have the semantic “贝”.
However, the phonetic element of most pictophoentic characters is not identical, but only similar. For example, the tones of “吗,妈,骂” are different from that of “马” (ma. “horse”). So it is a big mistake to cling obstinately to the rule that characters can always be pronounced according to their phonetic elements, because Chinese pronunciation has undergone great changes since the old times. Most Chinese characters were formed using the pictophonetic method of character formation.
Tens of thousands of Chinese characters have been formed using the four character-formation methods. By understanding the general rule of pictographic characters, we can try to guess the pronunciation and meaning of the Chinese characters that we haven’t learned.