[wonderzombie]

Seconded. I started learning Mandarin some years ago. The written language remained opaque for a very long time since you need to learn a rather long list of hanzi before you can read anything interesting. And there's little guarantee you'll be able to pronounce any of it anyway.

Korean was kind of revelatory for me. Maybe I don't know what all the words mean, but being able to sound them out Hangul is far more rewarding than it ought to be.

[ithkuil]

I had that same problem while learning Arabic, and that was just about missing short vowels.

[entropy_]

Well, when it comes to Arabic, the short vowels should be written out as accents of sorts. However, they are quite often missing in actual written text. However, even as a native Arabic speaker I will struggle with text written like that and it will take me a while to read it. That's because most Arabs(at least the Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptians I've mostly been exposed to) do not speak the written Arabic. Rather, we speak a colloquial language that will differ from one region to another. These are visibly descended from the formal, written, Arabic but they are not at all the same language. They have many different words, a completely different grammar, and very different pronunciation. So as far as most Arabs I know, the written Arabic is pretty much yet another foreign language they learn rather than their native language. The similarity between the written and spoken is similar to the difference between say Latin and languages that were descended from it(such as French).