Skill Rank 1 — Allows recognition of the language when spoken.
Skill Rank 2 — Allows user to communicate and understand very basic concepts in the form of single words or very short phrases (e.g., eat, danger, room, money, cost, enemy, bathroom, pain, etc.).
Skill Rank 3 — User can distinguish between major dialects. Allows user to communicate moderately basic concepts in the form of phrases. User can get the tone/context of the language when spoken at a normal rate, but no more. He can, however, understand basic phrases spoken at a slow pace.
Skill Rank 4 — User may converse on very simple subjects, using whole sentences instead of broken phrases. User can understand everyday conversa- tion when spoken slowly.
Just from reading these descriptions, I think just being able to read the language would not necessarily get you beyond rank two. But rank three would be very difficult. Rank 4, extremely unlikely. As I said in my earlier post, you might recognize a word here or there but that would definitely not be much in the way of saying "bathroom" and having a native speaker point in a direction.
I would suspect that a GM would discourage a player from buying excessive written ranks without buying any spoken if it is a language that the spoken version he has access to. But if a person is basically learning the language though some version of a Rosetta Stone, a basic translation device or coda, then they may have never heard the language. For instance, I suspect that there are dead languages which we have discovered that no one still speaks (ancient Mesopotamian) but we have some coda we use for translation which allows the scholar to know what the writings say. We may ascribe some spoken version to it but it likely is far off.