Experienced readers of alphabetic languages recognise words by pattern matching their shape. That is, you do not individually decipher the characters that make up a word, but you pattern match on (mostly) the ascenders and descenders, and then maybe sanity check first and last characters.<p>That greatly speeds up reading, but also makes it hard to discover typos, in particular characters inside of words that have no as-&#x2F;descenders.<p>In this way, alphabetic writing is maybe more accessible - novice readers can decipher character by character and map to phonemes, thus having a way to understand all words; experts pattern match and read faster.