Kind of reminds me of typing pinyin to write chinese.

Minus the short hand you can do there. Also unlike pinyin, there is no standard transliteration of Arabic into Latin characters nor vice verse, which makes reading transliterated Arabic very painful. Everyone just makes up what sounds right to them. You frequently don’t know if you’re reading MSA, Levantine, Egyptian, Gulf, Iraqi, Meghrebi, or Libyan (and that’s not even close to most of them).