@Llearner
I don’t think there’s anything magical about Chinese characters in and of themselves that cures the pronunciation problems you’ve outlined.
Using Japanese as an example, I read in full Kanji because it’s faster. I would hate to read anything at this point in just romaji or hiragana/katakana. But my knowledge of the Kanji, and even being able to identify the radicals they contain, doesn’t ensure anything about my speech being proper.
I know exactly what “chopsticks” and “bridge” look like on paper, but the only reason I know how to pronounce them correctly is because I’ve listened to tons of folk stories that talk about bridges, and I’ve been out to eat with friends.
I rely a ton on my listening experience. I’m already clicking quite a bit when I’m stretching myself in harder lessons with a lot of unknown vocab. I don’t click on or double check Kanji that I’m already confident reading or even confident minus. I just assume what sounds natural based on my experience and keep reading.
When I’m having a conversation and a word isn’t coming to me, I circumlocute, and in the few seconds I’m doing that, just the process of talking about similar vocabularly normally scares out the proper word.
I don’t have a mental visual scorecard in Kanji, romaji, or Kana. Nor do I make any discriminatory analysis about homonyms. I just say what comes out naturally. My Kanji knowledge has nothing to do with it, except for the huge secondary efffects of being able to read a lot more and hence have a higher input volume level.
For Chinese, the pinyin are dangerous for people allergic to characters because the pinyin are great. You can even denote the tones just using pinyin.
I don’t see any problem with someone speaking Chinese and only knowing pinyin to do it. The only disadvantage is your reading input volume will be terrible because you could cover a lot more ground if you could easily read the characters.
But again, knowing the characters doesn’t ensure anything about being able to speak properly.