I'm with the phonological camp. In fact, one of the things that surprised me greatly is that I can read Japanese dramatically more comfortably than English. I

I'm with the phonological camp. In fact, one of the things that surprised me greatly is that I can read Japanese dramatically more comfortably than English. I can read the symbolic characters very easily and since almost all of the phonetic characters in Japanese are grammar, I tend to gloss over it. However the grammar is very regular, so you can usually figure out what's going on without having to read every character. In fact, I get very frustrated when I read children's books because they often omit the Chinese characters for words and replace them with phonetic characters. I just can't read it without a massive struggle. It's also interesting that I vastly prefer computer programming languages that use symbols rather than words. One of the common "coding practices" in Ruby is to replace "if !whatever" with "unless whatever". I literally can't understand the latter and I'm always rewriting it in my editor to "if !whatever" so that I can understand the code. You might think I'm just used to it, but if I write "if not whatever" -- bam! I can't understand it. Weird, isn't it!