actually, AFAIK, all the studies I've seen about english say that when you read, what you're looking at is the shape and pattern of the word, not it's representation as a string of symbols pasted together. (this is why you can read things that are misspelled and not notice that there are mistakes- your brain thinks that the shape of the linked letters looks close enough and is interpreted as being the actual word... besides which, in english letters only represent syllables in the loosest sense- it's not like there is a self-consistent system)
I'm not sure if that middle meaning (of disparate symbols that compose the whole) detracts from making the "word" in it's entirety less abstract, but I would say in general that I think about words in terms of their abstract meaning first, then about their relation to other meanings and words. In general (and more so today with spell check) I would say that no native speaker is thinking about the letters that compose a given word.... I'm sure that there are people who can recall words by thinking of the word as it's written- that sounds like one of those memory retention "hacks" I hear about sometimes. Maybe that system is just more prevalent in the asian education system.
> Maybe that system is just more prevalent in the asian education system.
Sadly the modern Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese are choosing an alphabetical system rather than Chinese characters. The one and only civilization today still using logograms is China.
The Japanese have been using a hybrid system for some time now. I guess the number of Chinese characters they use regularly has become somewhat more limited, but it's been holding steady for quite a while now. They did try to get rid of them once, only to find out that it wasn't going to work very well.
You're right that the Koreans have pretty much abandoned logograms entirely, though. Now that they use hangul, I understand that there aren't many people remaining who can read anything written in their older writing systems.
I'm not sure if that middle meaning (of disparate symbols that compose the whole) detracts from making the "word" in it's entirety less abstract, but I would say in general that I think about words in terms of their abstract meaning first, then about their relation to other meanings and words. In general (and more so today with spell check) I would say that no native speaker is thinking about the letters that compose a given word.... I'm sure that there are people who can recall words by thinking of the word as it's written- that sounds like one of those memory retention "hacks" I hear about sometimes. Maybe that system is just more prevalent in the asian education system.