By the way, the sounds and meanings of a character are only partially determined by the pieces. For instance, the first character of 政府 (seifu, government) is 政 (sei, administration), and one could guess the sound of the character from the fact that the left part of it: 正 (see it? all scrunched up on the left side of 政). The right side of 政 is 攵, which here is just a Chinese verb marker, so all the reader could really guess from not knowing the character but only knowing the pieces is that it might have something to do with 正 (“correcting something, making something right”).
The pictorial composition is
政 = 正 + 攵 (正 is the left half of the character, and 攵 is the right half - see it?)
So to guess the meaning of a character just from the pieces is really hard, but fairly often you can get a hint at how to pronounce it (especially in Chinese*). For instance, almost all the general-use characters in Japanese that use the character 白 (Japanese-style pronunciation in Japanese is shiro, Chinese-style pronunciation in Japanese is haku, meaning is “white”) as a component are also pronounced haku: 伯 拍 泊 箔, but they don’t really have anything obvious to do with whiteness.
*Almost all Japanese characters have 1-3 Chinese-style pronunciations (called on-yomi) that are usually somewhat similar to their actual pronunciations in Mandarin, and many of the common characters also have several Japanese-style pronunciations (called kun-yomi), which usually have multiple syllables. You can only ever really guess the Chinese-style pronunciations, not the Japanese-style ones. You can guess that 志 is pronounced shi (Chinese-style), but it’d be very hard to guess that the Japanese-style pronunciation is kokorozashi. In Chinese itself, I gather that it’s much easier to guess the pronunciation of unknown characters, because all the characters have only Chinese-style readings.