How do you learn to link Chinese charaacters with sounds?

As Chinese is not phonectic, how do you learn to link Chinese characters with the corresponding sounds?

It is a mystery to me.

Wud Capsian and any other antimmoners who have learnt Chinese answer this question?

How does the learner of any language link the sounds of words with their meanings?

How do English speakers learn to link 1, 2, 3, ... to one, two, three...? It's such a mystery... as 1, 2, 3 is not phonetic...

OK, to be fair, this is what happens. Our brain has the capability of learning. And one component of this learning capability is this: upon being bombarded by the same stimulus repeatedly in time-ordered fashion, it is able to remember and recall what should be coming next. Let me explain. When you have a CD/tape player or any other music player device (iPot, mp3, etc.), when a song finishes, you know what the next song is, even BEFORE it is actually played. Notice this important part: during training, event A may be earlier than event B. But after training, our brain is actually capable of generating the receiving signals for event B earlier. So, say, there is a gap of 2 seconds between event A and event B, but once your brain is trained, upon receiving signal for event A, within less than say 0.05 seconds your brain is already prepared and expecting for the arrival of event B. That's how you learn to catch flying balls. That's how George W. Bush learnt to dodge the flying shoes.

The event A here is the visual input of symbol shaped 1, 2, 3. The event B here is the aural input of the sounds for one, two, three. There is a time gap. But because our brain can "pull forward" the time sequence, the visual-aural correlation becomes nearly instantaneous.

Any kind of sensory or internal brain signals are learned and correlated by this "pull forward" process, not just visual-aural. Eventually part of the training makes it into evolution (via natural selection), so even babies are not born blank: they come pre-packaged with lots of these correlations.

It's an interesting question - Little Tadpole seems to have given a detailed answer on which I would find it very difficult to expand.

I suppose the sound and the meaning come at the same time when I see a character that I know, not just a sound.

A Chinese person once told me that if she's quickly reading something in Chinese, in her head rather than out loud, she understands the meaning but she doesn't 'hear' the sounds of the words in her head as we do when reading in an alphabet. Is this true?

What you say is true. It's trait of autistic people. I wish there is a more neutral term to replace it. You may want to read about Temple Grandin's "Thinking in Pictures".

My personal case: my brain was silent was until I was 14 years old. I also used to think in pictures. I have also found other Chinese speakers that find it odd that you need a "voice" to think. But I have switched. Now there is voice inside my head when I think, and I cannot turn it off. Back then, because I grew up as multilingual, people used to ask me: in what language do you think? And I would find it funny, because back then, I found it laughable that you needed a language to think. I did not use any language to think, my thoughts were language independent.

Studies have been done (I read about it 20 years ago or so) about the brain activities of people that use ideographic languages versus phonetic languages when they read. They function differently.

Of course, everything is statistically speaking. You'll find Western people that think in pictures, as well as Chinese people that think verbally.

So, yes, apparently there are different ways how brains can function. I went through both phases, visual and verbal. But in my case I am not able to switch back.

Well, most Hanjas have a part representing the meaning, and a part representing the sound. For example, in these letters;

淸 精 情

The sound part is 靑.
The meaning part is 水, 米, 心, respectively.

Of course you can't decipher a Hanja's meaning and sound just based on etymology, but it makes memorizing much faster.

Most characters have the sound part and the meaning part as South Korean said.
Such as 请(please),清(clear),晴(sunny), 情(feeling). These four characters all have the same sound part 青（This character means blue）.
Keep in mind the form of each character and the pronunciation of each character. Untill you see a character ,you immediately read its sound.