Thoughts about reading (as in deciphering)

Here are some thoughts about the act of reading symbols and more or less automatically deciphering or interpretating them

1 one

1.1 Impossible to not read a text you're looking at if you know how to read its writing system

Have you never been striken by the fact that, despite it took you years and years of painful efforts to achieve your current reading skills, as soon as you lay your eyes on a word, it is AUTOMATICALLY read by your brain?
You simply can't see a word written with the Latin Alphabet and not read it. As soon as you see it, BAM! you 'hear' it in your head or you understand what it is supposed to mean.
Just try to see the following word without immediately reading it, to see the shapes that form it but without interpretating it:

computer

Impossible to do if you can read.
Isn't that somewhat scary? You can't go back. You will never again be able to look at a text written with the Latin alphabet and just see pretty shapes and symbols. Nope, you're doomed to read it.
(Unless you acquire pure alexia, which can happen if you have a stroke or a tumor that leaves the wrong part of the brain damaged. But, let's hope it doesn't happen.)

1.2 With writing systems you don't know however, you just see shapes but you don't read it. Yeah it sounds obvious but this is important

Take a quick look at the following texts written using various writing systems.

Obviously unless you're very knowledgeable about all these writing systems, you can't read the majority of them, and all you can see are seemingly meaningless shapes.

1.3 The time it takes (1)

Again this will sound obvious but this is important. Here I give you a chart for various writing systems. If you take a few minutes you will be able to write stuff phonetically, and to also read some words (phonetically) writen in these writing systems.

Now you'll notice that even if you've managed to write/read a few words, if you look at the text above, you're still clueless. It will still take you a lot of time to decipher a word.
And here's the kicker: even if you knew by heart all the letters/symbols of that WS, you'd still need a lot of time to read it. I know because I know my hiraganas by heart, but it still takes me forever to read a text writen in hiraganas... if I don't know what it means, and if I don't know the words formed by these hiraganas.

1.4 The time it takes (2)

I think that's important: if you know what a text means, in other words if you know the meaning of all (or the majority of) its words, it's considerably faster to read.
Alright look: take a look at the following sentence:
A king should not take his job lightly, as he has very important responsabilities.
Quite easy and fast to read right? Now take a look at the following giberish and try to read it aloud, phonetically, as fast as you read the previous sentence:
Gijket ytra faleg utobhadi kalbasidar muac quaop jugaddoanf jhabor roplikayo.
It most likely took you a bit more time to read that one. Well ok, you might have read it fairly quickly, but I'm sure you at least stumbled upon a word or two for a fraction of seconds; something that didn't happen with the previous sentence. And notice that you read the previous sentence very quickly, while a lot of its words don't read as they are spelled. That means when we read in English or whatever language we're used to read, we don't read phonetically (but read next point because that may not be so true after all).

1.4.4 Update on what I've written in 1.4

Ah well, things are never as simple as they appear. Apparently, scientific studies suggests that we do read letter by letter, even as literate adults who can read very fast. When you lay your eyes upon a word, your brain first analyses the shapes, then recognizes the letters, then associates them together (into a word), then connects the word to its meaning. All this occurs in different parts of the brain, that scientifics have properly isolated. Thing is, we do it very fast, without even thinking about it, which gives the illusion that we are reading word by word rather than letter by letter.

1.5 The time it takes (3)

Now take a look at the following sentence and try to read as fast as any sentence you would:

This system delibarately chases the crossing of the immediate jealousy to buy some energic reality.

Again it should take a bit more time than it would, because it doesn't make sense at all.
I think from all these little experiments we can infer that when we're reading we're obviously not reading phonetically, we're not reading letter by letter, and we're not even reading word by word either, we're reading structures made of these elements. Or at least, that's what intuitively comes to my mind.

1.6 Ideograms may not be so stupid after all

1.6.1 Ideograms

I can't help but feel a bit suspicious that we read word by word... at least at some level.
Let's take a look at Japanese, which uses ideograms (called Kanjis). I would rather talk about Chinese, which exclusively uses ideograms, unlike Japanese, but I'm far more familiar with Japanese.
For a long time I though ideograms were a bit silly because they're obviously far more complicated and difficult to learn than a good old alphabet like our own.
There are thousands of kanjis and they all are far more complicated that a single of our Latin letters. Each kanji can represent a word, and each word can be made up of two or more kanjis. Some kanjis represent a monosyllabic word (well Japanese uses 'moras' more than syllables but let's keep it simple), and other kanjis represent words that are more than one or two syllables.
Further more, Japanese is made of three distincts writing systems (the complex Kanjis, for words and verbs and lexems, the simpler Hiraganas, used for grammatical words, and the also simple Katakanas, used for foreign words).
And YET, Japanese people manage to read Japanese texts as fast as we read English texts written using only 26 letters and a few punctuation marks.
How is that even possible?

1.6.2 Words/kanjis: basically the same

I think the answer is simple, and we already kind found it earlier: Japanese people read structures (that are made even more obvious by the opposition kanjis/hiraganas) before they read words. Or maybe the reverse, I don't know. In any case, they read sentences made of kanjis as easily as we read English sentences made of letters.
Now I think that there's another truth that we must accept: in every writen languages, words are kanjis. Or they are like kanjis on some levels in any case.
In a lot of languages that uses the Latin alphabet, English oh so included, words are not writen as they are pronounced. If that were the case, break and leak would be written the same way. Same for read (present) and read (preterit). There all very complicated to learn, when you think about it. Sometimes a word is long to write but very short to pronounce, etc. And since we don't take the time to read them one after the other, I think it must be the same with Japanese.

1.6.3 Ideograms: harder to learn, but not to read

However alphabets made up of a few dozens of letters like the Latin alphabet, have the obvious advantage to be predictable: if you know your alphabet, you can read any word. But if you think about it, that's not entirely true either, because a lot of words are spelled in a completely arbitrary fashion, which is why we still have to sometimes ask, "how is this word spelled again?".
But I'm nitpicking. Of course alphabets made up letters are easier to learn... but not easier to read for some reason. That's the real mystery!
Why are complicated ideograms like the Chinese and Japanese ones not harder to read (once you're familiar with them) than Latin letters? I can't tell yet.
In fine, ideograms are not THAT much more stupid than letters, because they can be read as easily as letters. They're still harder to learn though, so I'd still take an alphabet over an ideogram system.