Chinese is a ton of memorization and figuring things out from context, mostly (source: am an adult learner, been learning for about a year now). I’d say it’s not directly comparable to learning spelling of any latin-alphabet based language (source: english is my second language, I had to learn it the hard way when I was old enough to remember the pain of it). But interestingly enough a lot of characters do have some clues in them, either for pronunciation, meaning, or both. You start to see the patterns after a while. Basic example: 妈妈 (ma1ma - mother), 妈 character consists of 女 (nü3 - woman), and 马 (ma3 - horse). Woman part is related to the meaning, horse part is a pronunciation clue since it’s also a ma sound (albeit with a different tone). But even with the clues you have to sit down and just memorize a ton of characters, which is not what the 3 clue system is doing.