Just that. Written English is phonetic, so I can easily read an unfamiliar word by sounding it out. Even though I don’t always get it right, usually I’m close enough to be understood.
How does this work in Chinese, or Japanese?
Edit – OK, yes I get it! English isn’t really phonetic. It’s just that when I was learning to read and write, our school used a method they called phonics. It must have confused the heck out of most kids, because they abandoned the method soon after, but it worked for me. We had a lot of practice in recognizing the various patterns words can take, and the many exceptions. So for me, who always did very well in English class, words tend to be easy to spell out.
I’m really glad not to have to figure it out as an adult, because I’m sure I’d be just as frustrated as some of you friends are! And I promise you that you are much better at English than I am at your language.
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The answer for Japanese is, recognize the radicals (individual parts of kanji) and look that up in the dictionary til you find the kanji. But also in Japanese there are a good amount, albeit with plenty exceptions, of kanji where you can guess how to read a kanji character because radicals can also serve not just as meaning, but indicators of how to pronounce a character as well.
Not sure about Languages like Chinese, but I’m seeing from other comments here that it seems to be a similar process. I won’t comment on those though, just the answer for Japanese (:
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