There is some misinformation floating around about Chinese writing. One such factoid is that the characters are completely unrelated to pronunciation. However, many characters were created based on their pronunciation. For example, the characters for horse , scold , and mother are very similar because their pronunciation is similar. This linking between pronunciation and character is common but by no means universal.
Most characters have no such link.
When there is a link, sometimes the characters include a little box, the ko , symbolizing the mouth, to indicate that there is a sound part to the character. Don't count on it, though. Many of the characters are stylized pictures of the object in question. Some are clear and some have been abstracted out of all recognition. And there is the interesting case of words such as ghost , whose symbol is said to be a picture of a ghost, which as one commentator said is a statement hard to disprove.