Its funny you mention that because I instantly thought of Japanese. I spent a few years there and learned to speak fairly well, but never learned to read much beyond the phonetically based character systems (hiragana and katakana), but never more than a hundred or so of the commonly used kanji. And while kanji are technically associated with specific sounds, there are tens of thousands of them, and they all can have different sounds in different situations. Since returning from Japan, I've been trying to do some studying of kanji with mixed success, and I find that it virtually requires the type of thinking here: trying to determine what the word would be based on context, as well as connecting the symbols in the kanji (which often do have meaning) words.
