How Can a Chinese Word Help You Get By?

Like a lot of the Korean language is based on the Chinese characters. So then that was also really hard because you would have to know how to write it and know like the Korean term for it pretty much. And I'm wondering if it's sort of similar in Chinese too, where you know, like one of the characters, but not the other. There's just certain like parts of a character. Sometimes a character can be split into the left and the right side. Sometimes it can be split from like the top and the bottom. If you ever see that in a word, then that means that word might have some sort of relation to water. It might not have like a direct meaning