That's the point though. To learn Hungarian or Swedish, you'll have to learn the spoken language, and then reading and writing comes essentially for free.

In Chinese, you have to learn the spoken language, and then you have spend just as much time (if not more) to learn the written language.

Many Chinese characters do contain elements of meaning and elements of pronunciation, but that doesn't mean that you don't have to learn them.

"Dilapidated" contains elements of its meaning in the root lapis = stone, but you'd be hard pressed to deduce the meaning from it.