[est]

> people wouldn't need to switch from Classical Chinese to Written Mandarin.

Yeah and when did that happen and what's the phenomenon called in Chinese?

> it wouldn't matter if you wrote 學而時習之，不亦說乎？ or 學習知識以後，常常溫習它，不也很快樂嗎？

That's kind of the point. If you were a LLM, the 學 and 說 would get most attention, the rest of characters is trivial and you don't need precisly recall the "sound" representation. You can even swap the order like

習學識知後，常常習溫它，不很也樂快嗎？

ppl get this in "writing", but not "speaking"