The lack of pronunciation information doesn't seem to me like a flaw; it's just not what they were trying to teach. After all, Chinese uses semantic logographs,

The lack of pronunciation information doesn't seem to me like a flaw; it's just not what they were trying to teach. After all, Chinese uses semantic logographs, not phonetic representations, and lots of different spoken languages use the same Chinese writing system (thus a Shanghainese speaker can exchange letters with a Mandarin speaker despite difficulty actually conversing). Unlike learning to read, write, and speak English, or Russian, or Hindi (e.g.), learning to read Chinese and learning to speak some specific dialect of Chinese are much more distinct tasks, and this is tackling only one of them.