[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by ahi

Do you mean "never learned the sounds"? Or just never learned how to properly pronounce the sounds?

Do you have any books or links you could recommend on this topic?

It would definitely take some digging. I took off my Sinology hat a few years ago.

Basically though, spoken medium was neglected entirely quite often. Since many early translators were working with classical texts, they were dealing with the predominantly monosyllabic literary Chinese. In poetry, rhyme and meter are important (though in Mandarin, many rhymes and tone patterns are lost, somewhat preserved in older varieties of Chinese and in linguistic reconstructions), so many translators learned each character, including sound in one dialect or another, but would not be able to put together a spoken sentence. These functions can be independent, and frequently were with literary translators.

here excerpted from books, by mostly non-Chinese/non-Japanese academics, about why Hanzi/Kanji is bad/evil/unnecessary.

Do Chinese / Japanese people not find entire books written by foreigners about why the Chinese/Japanese are fools not to convert to the superior latin alphabet somewhat offensive, or at least arrogant?

- Ahi

I recall some of those authors...one of my own professors had at one time plans to write about what he called the "tyranny of kanji", though I don't know if it ever came to any sort of fruition.

Complaints about the Chinese writing system aren't uncommon domestically. The simplification of Chinese on the mainland was one compromise among the many possible that were intended to improve literacy and facilitate easier learning. Chinese characters were denounced by many intellectuals in the early 20th Century in China as an unwanted vestige of a stagnant civilization. The sentiment is easily shared by many Westerners who have had some degree of frustration in memorizing characters. I myself have been found in situations asking "how do you pronounce..." and then drawing with my finger in the air, or explaining the character in radicals when no dictionary was available.

I think some Chinese and Japanese get offended at the audacity of some foreigners declaring the shortcomings of their venerable language...but that's usually more a disagreement with arrogance or personality, not with the idea itself. The majority of Chinese people I know are of the mind that they've already learned it, so why change it? I suppose that kind of attitude rubs many Westerners the wrong way too.