Having studied both Chinese and English, I agree with you. Once you possess some sort of mastery with the English alphabet, you can more or less pronounce words

Having studied both Chinese and English, I agree with you. Once you possess some sort of mastery with the English alphabet, you can more or less pronounce words phonetically. You might not know the meaning, but you could at least read it. With Chinese, Mandarin in particular, either you know the word or you don't. There might be clues to the word that (equivalent to English prefixes, roughly) allow you to associate it with an ideogram that you recognize and guess its pronunciation, but then you have to choose among 4 intonations of saying it.