You can often guess meaning or sound from the character. E.g. 海, 洲, 流 (sea, continent, flow) all have three dots on the left indicating they relate to water.

You can often guess meaning or sound from the character. E.g. 海, 洲, 流 (sea, continent, flow) all have three dots on the left indicating they relate to water. And 领, 玲, 铃 are all pronounced ling due to the 令 component. Characters that aren't widely used you don't need to learn to write, and reading is much easier than writing. If you see a big complicated character in a noodle-y context you pretty much know it's going to be biang. If you don't know the pronunciation of a character it's not too far from not knowing the meaning of a random English word like "kaiserin", apart from being slightly harder to guess pronunciation on average.