Here's an example of a series of phono-semantic characters that's fairly easy to pronounce for English speakers.
成, 誠, 城 all are pronounced cheng, so we say that 成 is the phonetic compound that the other two characters use to denote their own pronunciation.
言 and 土 on the other two characters then are semantic compounds that hint at the meaning of the character.
言 indicates speech/language and 誠 can be interpreted as "true to one's word," i.e. honest/straightforward/earnest/sincere.
土 indicates earth and by extension that which is built and 城 is in fact a kind of structure, namely "city walls" (later also just "city").
There's some subtlety here where the pronunciation rule doesn't always hold exactly, e.g. 盛 is pronounced sheng, and sometimes not at all, e.g. 兌, 說, and 悅 are all pronounced very differently from one another. This is due to a variety of hysterical raisins.
成, 誠, 城 all are pronounced cheng, so we say that 成 is the phonetic compound that the other two characters use to denote their own pronunciation.
言 and 土 on the other two characters then are semantic compounds that hint at the meaning of the character.
言 indicates speech/language and 誠 can be interpreted as "true to one's word," i.e. honest/straightforward/earnest/sincere.
土 indicates earth and by extension that which is built and 城 is in fact a kind of structure, namely "city walls" (later also just "city").
There's some subtlety here where the pronunciation rule doesn't always hold exactly, e.g. 盛 is pronounced sheng, and sometimes not at all, e.g. 兌, 說, and 悅 are all pronounced very differently from one another. This is due to a variety of hysterical raisins.