Are you trying to create a strawman? How do you learn characters without their pronunciation? There is nothing else to learn other than that. If you know the "alphabet" equivalent then you can pronunciate words written in that alphabet. Nothing more. Nothing less.
There is one exception which is Japanese where many characters merely have a meaning associated to them which need to be combined to form words. Sure, you do have to blindly memorize that but often the kanji on its own doesn't have one pronunciation, it has many and therefore it doesn't make sense to memorize all of them. Instead you just have to associate the pronunciation of the entire word with a given combination of Japanese characters.
