Attempt is the word here.

Phonics are of use as long as your spoken/heard vocabulary bank exceeds your read vocabulary bank. I think that after a while most people in modern societies end up learning most vocabulary through the written medium, making phonics... less useful as they gain experience?.

I have been told repeatedly that I am a highly atypical sample of one, but I do believe that most people might sound out new words for use in spoken conversation (I don't) but retain the shape of the word along with the pronunciation, and that experienced readers do shape recognition rather than sounding out. All those viral emails/posts going round with the letters shuffled around or replaced with numbers, right?

My mother tongue uses a rather idiosyncratic alphabetic writing system -- not as bad as English (http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j17/caos.php#caos for anybody who believes there is any solid logic to English phonics), but much less straightforward than, say, modern Spanish or the Japanese syllabic system. I was never taught English phonics, and muddling through on my own I managed to acquire a large amount of vocabulary I can use in writing but cannot pronounce properly -- and you wouldn't believe how rarely some of those words come up in daily conversation, even after living in the US for over 10 years.

From the link above, my opinion on the (complete lack of) logic of English spelling:
Quote
Readers will notice that The Chaos is written from the viewpoint of the foreign learner of English: it is not so much the spelling as such that is lamented, as the fact that the poor learner can never tell how to pronounce words encountered in writing (the poem was, after all, appended to a book of pronunciation exercises).

With English today the prime language of international communication, this unpredictability of symbol-sound correspondence constitutes no less of a problem than the unpredictability of sound-symbol correspondence which is so bewailed by native speakers of English.