After studying Japanese for a while, I can read text in hiragana, katakana, and a few kanji, but I can't read it in the same way I can English text. When I look at English text, it seems like the transfer from symbols to sound to meaning (not necessarily true understanding, but at least at the word level) is almost instantaneous. When I look at the text, even without trying to read it, it looks like something meaningful. And looking at any individual word of less than insane length, knowing what it means certainly is quite quick.
One mildly frustrating thing about learning Japanese, or probably any language with a different alphabet, is that you don't even have this ground to stand on. Although I've noticed gradual improvement, when I look at a Japanese word I am still going one symbol at a time, except when it's a word I know pretty well and I semiconsciously expect to find it there, like desu at the end of a sentence. When reading kanji, I don't have to sound anything out, although recognition might take a bit, but a very disconcerting phenomenon is that sometimes I can know what it means without even being able to pronounce it! (Each character has anywhere from 1-8 different pronunciations, most have 2 or 3, there are many many homophones, and knowing which to use when is nontrivial.) Surely this is my own limited experience talking, but there's something very wrong about knowing what a word means without being able to say it.
The tradeoff for this struggle is being able to appreciate the beauties of another alphabet, in this case the largest one in the world. I doubt I would be saying this if I were studying in school rather than on my own, but I really take joy in learning the curves and balances of the hiragana, and trying to handwrite them well. What I'm finding is that, with textbook printing as my main source, I'm handwriting them the way I see them. But when I see handwritten Japanese, I realize this probably looks as silly as someone handwriting a's and g's the way they appear in print. At some point I should probably try to pick up P.G. O'Neill's "A Reader of Handwritten Japanese," but the hardcover goes for quite a bit.
Another comment on reading as a cognitive process: after noticing that I am sometimes able to read Japanese quickly if I know what's coming, such as that a Japanese McDonald's sign will say "Makudonarudo," I started to wonder if perhaps I am not doing something similar in English sometimes. It is certainly true that one anticipates things both in reading and listening, but do I still read every word and every letter or not? It's exceedingly difficult to tell, and probably varies a lot from person to person. I'm a pretty careful and slow reader, but I have occasionally realized that I mentally inserted a word into something I was reading that turned out not to actually be there, only realizing that upon further inspection. My boss is a very quick and impatient reader and probably relies heavily on anticipation of what will be there to get the full meaning, and does not by his admission look at every word.
Unrelated: I'm working on a memorization method that could be called the distraction method. I read the material I want to memorize, then intentionally distract myself, then see if I can remember it; if not, repeat. This is actually pretty difficult, sort of like Douglas Adams' instructions for flying: throw yourself at the ground and miss.
