See, phonetic spelling may be problematic in English, but reading, to me, is not a single- language skill. Reading an alphabet is a phonetic skill. Ideographic erc. systems generally have a system as well, otherwise they aren't very powerful.
Anyway, that's why I'm in the phonetics camp. DS reads ideographs quite well, and writes them frequently (mostly combining traffic signals and other ideographs common in north america). He has a strong sence of the system for those ideographs (particles for beware, do X, do not X, general ideas of how to simplify an image to form a glyph, where to put glyphs on a page to make a cohearent message, etc). But given our primary system is alphabetic, I put a premium on that kind of reading that I wasn't 100% aware of until just now.
Gee, I like this forum. I'm going to have awesome dreams tonight.
(typing on an ipad does not make for good looking posts about reading. Sigh)
