Re: What do words and letters look like to people who cant read?

Actually, words and letters simply look like "symbols" to a person who can't 
read -- they look like pictures.  A person who can't read will see the same 
symbol letters you are seeing now, but the person has not yet learned 
to "decode" them into the sounds of human speech (which are 
called "phonemes").  Every letter of the alphabet is a symbol picture.  It 
makes a code.  People need to learn how to match the speech sounds to the coded 
symbol letters.  Once this happens, the person sees the symbol letters, and 
then a "sound" is associated in their mind to each letter.  This is 
called "phonemic learning" or "phonemic awareness."  

When you look at the Chinese characters in the Chinese language, or the Korean 
Characters, or the Japanese alphabet, all you see are "pictures," but, unless 
you know the "sound-codes" for these pictures, you will not be able to 
understand the coded phonemic language.  You will need to learn how these 
people code the sounds of their language into their pictures, before you can 
read what they write.

The alphabet that we are using now comes from pictures, from a long time ago in 
the past.  Over many hundreds of years, this alphabet was used for many world 
languages, and their language sounds were identified by the letters.  The 
letters in American English do not have exactly the same sounds as in British 
English (but they are similar).  The same letters are used to "code" many other 
languages, such as Spanish, French, Italian, Latin, Portugese, etc. Some of the 
letters in these other languages have the same "sound codes" as you use, but 
other letters have different "sound codes" in the other languages, even if they 
are using the same alphabet.

English is a mixture of words from many languages.  Some of the English words 
use words that are "borrowed" from other languages.  So, when you find a word 
that is "borrowed" from another language, you need to use the "sound coding" 
from the OTHER language, to read that word.  For example, the word "bouquet" is 
a French word.  You need to know that, in French, the "ou" is pronounced 
as "oo," and the "qu" is pronounced as "k."  This comes from education and 
experience.  Once you know these things, then you can read the word "Bouquet" 
and know that it is pronounced as "boo-KAY" and not "bow-kweht"!!

There are other codes, like braille, Morse Code, and semaphore, that also 
represent letters and sound codes in different ways.  They don't look like the 
letters of the alphabet, but those codes also are used to code the sounds of 
human spoken languages.

For more information, you can look up the 
keywords "Phonics," "phonemes," "phonemic awareness," "semiotics," 
and "linguistics" when you do a search on your computer.  You can also ask a 
Professor of Linguistics, and/or a Professor of Early Childhood Education, at 
your local college or university.