In Chinese teaching system, part of a character is used to represent a phoneme, basically you take part of a common character, to represent the part of pronunciation, and use it to spell out the pronunciation of a new character. Which is very similar to a phonetic language, and it shares more similarity with Hirigana, which is also phonetic.

You mean the radicals. As far as I know you can't construct the pronunciation of a chinese word from the character that represents it, not even the radical will help you. You literally have to memorize it. Every chinese kid does it.

The radical exists for the chinese dictionary as an over complicated lookup mechanism.

Radicals are the other half of phono-semantic compounds. For example, in 媽媽 māma "mother", 女 nǚ "woman" (the first half of 女書 nǚshū "woman's writing") is the radical and 馬 mǎ "horse" is the phonetic part. The radical helps narrow down the meaning and the phonetic component gives you an approximation of the pronunciation. Of course it depends on the time and place the character was coined and even then it wasn't always an exact match (see the phonetic series at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Chinese), but if you have multiple reasonable guesses for the word, it can pretty much narrow them down to one. Similarly, the radical alone can't communicate the full meaning, but it helps with disambiguation. That's why dictionaries used it as a coarse categorization method.

That's true, but as a person who learned Chinese the phono semantic part of the word didn't really help or is even taught in Chinese school.

I'm talking about Chinese school for ABCs where everybody is assumed to know how to speak Chinese. We are literally just taught the radical and we memorize the word and sound without being taught the phonetic part of it.

> Chinese school for ABCs

That's your problem, most American Born Chinese can barely pronounce their own last names right; "Chinese Schools" in America are mostly just a formality.