You would likely be interested in Literary Chinese, specifically the way they read it in Japan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun )

In theory you can do that with any language that has a written form (eg. English). Just that it's counter intuitive and nobody does it that way.

I doubt anyone _actually_ learns Mandarin without learning how the common characters are pronounced... Unless you don't have to verbally communicate with a teacher / fellow classmates?

I am learning simplified Chinese without the pronunciation. "It significantly cuts the amount of memorization." I thought. I am primarily interested in Chinese internet which I believe will open a massive new world, and understanding how this completely different way of expressing oneself works.

When I go through a text I understand I either don't sound the words or pronounce broken translation in my mind.

I've doubted this approach a few times because, as you say, it's uncommon, but I'm sticking with it and I'm curious what comes out of it in a year or two.

By the way, AFAIK (not an expert) the Chinese internet often uses pinyin to obscure various "sensitive" words, so you might eventually have to learn some pronunciations :)

The article seems about 10 years out of date...

Sure, but it gets the point across.

So you're mapping characters straight onto English? That seems inflexible.

It's not that simple. Let's say you memorized the main meanings of all characters in a Simplified Chinese character dictionary - each sentence you read will feel as if you've understand the verbs and very basic nouns in the sentence, but the way they're connected to each other would be quite a wild guess.

For instance, rewriting your sentence above into something somewhat like this:

I finish wonder this; accept word element character language, you not think word ability read language.

Hardly readable once you start getting long sentences in books. Japanese speakers can't just natively go ahead read and understand 95% of a Mandarin book even if they know all the Simplified/Traditional Chinese characters which are not commonly used in Japanese. They can sometimes understand simple sentences, and can more easily understand, say, street signs.

That's how my Japanese friends get around when in Taiwan. According to them, they understand ~95% of everything that's written, but have no idea how to express any of that verbally.

It's the same the other way round. I'm a from Hong Kong and I have no trouble reading Kanji in Japan. Once I learned Katakana (which usually just transliterates English) I can also decode 95+% of the things written.

And I can't communicate verbally at all...

That said, the voice in my head just pronounces the Japanese Kanji in my native Cantonese...