With Hanzi you almost certainly can’t.

I think this issue stems from historically Han text being used for more languages than just Mandarin. Han text being written in a vernacular Mandarin style is a quite recent invention.

Chinese has an advantage in that you can often devise a meaning from characters in a way you often can’t in English, but not pronunciation.

Funnily enough, the recent popularity of compound words in Chinese has made this even better.

For a commonly cited example, 火山 which means volcano, is literally composed of "fire mountain". 计算机 literally means computing machine. An alternative writing of computer, 电脑, literally means electric brain.

You can also apply some of that knowledge to Japanese and vice versa

With a latin alphabet I can look out a new word and most likely work out how it’s pronounced, or at least be close.

This is more true of Vietnamese, Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian etc.

It's less true of English where memorization plays a big role

you've got it completely backwards. Library is also 'book building' but in fucked up latin.

you can figure out english meanings of words through germanic, latin, and greek roots & how the other word parts modify it---but pronunciation is completely arbitrary. a very casual relationship exists in english between how even directly borrowed words are pronounced vis-a-vis their original language