Oh, it's very definitely context. (And it helps if it's something you wrote yourself, obviously... though I still struggle with my own handwriting in English occasionally. Somehow or other at the end of my last manuscript I managed to write "a clear mind" in such a staggering scribble that it looked for all the world like "a sober mind", and since the meaning was not entirely implausible I actually typed it up like that before doing a double-take!)
I used to be able to read pre-WW2 Gothic (Fraktur) German type, because a number of the very old books I'd been doing teach-yourself-German practice in had been set in the old typeface, notably the Heine. After a bit of experience I could read it quite fluently, *until* I hit a proper noun or a word I didn't know, and at that point I was all at once right back at the start struggling to decipher the individual letter-shapes sufficiently to be able to pronounce the word, let alone understand it! Clearly my brain was doing an awful lot of predicting and interpreting from context, as opposed to actually reading the text in front of my eyes.
But that makes sense, because in English I'm a speed-reader: I don't spell out each word individually at all, I just skim over the whole sentence and inhale the meaning in one comprehensive gulp. Which is why I'm super-sensitive to grammatical errors, because as soon as the structure of the prose stops working exactly according to rule my brain can't subconsciously speed-read it any more. It does a massive hiccup and stops in order to force my conscious mind to puzzle it out instead, which creates a mental sensation akin to suddenly tripping over an obstruction on the pavement :-(
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2025-05-26 04:29 pm (UTC)I used to be able to read pre-WW2 Gothic (Fraktur) German type, because a number of the very old books I'd been doing teach-yourself-German practice in had been set in the old typeface, notably the Heine. After a bit of experience I could read it quite fluently, *until* I hit a proper noun or a word I didn't know, and at that point I was all at once right back at the start struggling to decipher the individual letter-shapes sufficiently to be able to pronounce the word, let alone understand it! Clearly my brain was doing an awful lot of predicting and interpreting from context, as opposed to actually reading the text in front of my eyes.
But that makes sense, because in English I'm a speed-reader: I don't spell out each word individually at all, I just skim over the whole sentence and inhale the meaning in one comprehensive gulp. Which is why I'm super-sensitive to grammatical errors, because as soon as the structure of the prose stops working exactly according to rule my brain can't subconsciously speed-read it any more. It does a massive hiccup and stops in order to force my conscious mind to puzzle it out instead, which creates a mental sensation akin to suddenly tripping over an obstruction on the pavement :-(