That irks me as well because in Japanese, Kanji readings have can have dozens of meanings (On and Kun), and even first year Kanji of about 30 symbols turns out

That irks me as well because in Japanese, Kanji readings have can have dozens of meanings (On and Kun), and even first year Kanji of about 30 symbols turns out to be 200 different words for the same group. I lived in Vietnam for 6 months with a host family. They said native speakers don't get upset that people don't bother to learn it because they only people that speak it correctly are Vietnamese. It is too hard (it is more complex tonally than Chinese - six tones vs 3). During my travels: An Italian market clerk wouldn't sell me food until I repeated his sentence correctly; in Cyprus they wouldn't sell me sunscreen because I couldn't count (they refused to break a large bill and laughed that I couldn't count out my change...), and Panama I got literally yelled at for not asking for the Wi-Fi key correctly in Spanish.