system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What happens when a native chinese speaker encounters a character they don't know?

Say a chinese man is reading a text out loud. He finds a character he doesn't know. Does he have a clue what the pronunciation is like? Does he know what tone to use? Can he take a guess, based on similarity with another character with, say, few or less strokes, or the same radical? Can he imply the meaning of that character by context?
gpt
In Chinese, the characters are actually made up of even more characters. While there isn't an alphabet per se, the Chinese language has certain words that are used as sort of "foundations" for other words. 

Look at these: 你,他,他們 (ni, ta, ta men). Those words mean you, him, and them, respectively. If you've noticed, there's one common factor among the characters: those things on their extreme lefts. That character is actually "人" (ren), and that's how 人 is written when it's alone, that is, without any other character beside it to form another word. 人 means person, and tells us that the word it's in means something with "person".

So, if someone were to come across the word "他" and not know what it meant, the character on its very left is an indication of its having to do with people.

I suppose it's by context that a person is to imply the meaning of a character he isn't familiar with.

As for pronunciation, similar-looking words are more often than not pronounced similarly; they most likely just have different tones. It's mostly to do with familiarity when it comes to properly pronouncing characters.

Hope this helped.

Edit: Holy crap, thanks for the gold.