I've always wondered if you pronounced your name the Polish way or whether your family had "Latinized" it after emigrating (it happens). I guess you've answered that now.

As for Chinese writing (which is, of course, different from spoken Chinese languages) it was kept deliberately difficult in historical times to make it harder for people to pass the qualifying exams into the Civil Service. It must be the only example of a language that was intended as a barrier to communication ...

Contrast written Vietnamese, which uses the Latin alphabet, but with special signs to indicate the tones.