> Learning Chinese with a phonetic alphabet (bopomofo) is pretty common as far as I know, maybe just in Taiwan though. I suppose China mostly uses pinyin for this now.

I have also seen this in learning materials:

1. Putting the phonetic spelling (e.g. pinyin or bopomofo) in small print above the characters; a similar approach (furigana) is used for kanji in Japanese (in language textbooks and apps as well as books for beginning readers); there are special fonts as well as browser extensions, etc.; for Chinese/hanzi a font with phonetic superscripts would probably work well.

2. Phonetic sets; in addition to semantic elements/radicals, many characters also contain a phonetic element, which may not be exact (perhaps a bit like phonics in English) but studying groups of characters that share the same phonetic element can help with figuring out pronunciation or recognizing less familiar characters.