"You don’t really pronounce the logogram.
"Right, it’s not phonetic in the way that English is phonetic. So I took the alien language to be that kind of writing system. I still took the visual system to be encoding the same concepts of the oral system so that the aliens would have for any given concept a written version and a spoken version. Logographic systems on Earth are essentially similar. The Japanese have three different writing systems. One of them, Kanji, is shared with Chinese. The spoken languages are very different. The Japanese speaker and the Chinese speaker can’t talk to each other, but they share a writing system because the writing system doesn’t actually match phonetically onto the sounds of the language."
I began to doubt the linguist here. I understand that many people use 'logogram' as a shorthand to describe whatever Chinese is, but she seems to be taking it seriously.
Chinese isn't written with 1 symbol per word (or idea or whatever); it would be more true to say that it is syllabic, where most common Chinese words are one syllable.
Many (most?) Chinese glyphs are made up of a root and a radical, where one part indicates the "class" or "topic" of the symbol and the other indicates the pronunciation (at least at one time).
She seems to be dancing around the idea that a Chinese speaker and a Japanese speaker could communicate by writing, each in their respective languages, and be understood through the magic of Kanji/logograms. That is not the case, too my understanding.
I'm given to understand that one feature of all known natural writing systems is that they are based off of the languages' vocabulary, grammar, etc., however hidden by changes between when the writing system was formalized and now. The idea that a writing system would not record what someone would say is weird.