Generally it's no problem and many can. But some do get it wrong when it comes to characters that are less frequent used. Pinyin is also a very common PC input method. Since Mandarin is a very ambiguous language you often can not get a clear meaning with pinyin only.

for your infromation, an earlier phonetic system named "國語注音符號" was introduced 100 years ago, and it is still used in Taiwan. see http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E6%B3%A8%E9%9F%B3%E7%AC%A6%E8%99%9F or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

People who speak Chinese in PRC have to learn pinyin before chinese characters. And as anita998710 said people in Taiwan use "國語注音符號".

Historically,so called pinyin has nothing to do with Chinese characters. And we do not know a passage of words written in pinyin, goshhhh, what hell is that?! cuz they are not Chinese.

Sally, there are no English letters. We use Latin letters.