Oh man, I recognize that font on the top half anywhere. One of my milestone goals was to play Pokemon Green since it’s only in Japanese. I feel like that game is gonna be harder to get through than I thought since I didn’t consider the lower resolution for things like dialogue text 
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After reading the replies: I bet in Japanese that if particles were left in place (providing a lot of context on their own, and also marking ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings’ of words/phrases) and everything was written in kana, then there would be an analogous level of shuffling of characters that would leave the text as readable to fluent Japanese readers as an ‘equivalent’ English text would be for fluent English readers.
Even the example quoted below, even I was able to make out quite a bit of it. Although obviously I couldn’t do it at a fluent speed – I still can’t even read the unscrambled version at a fluent speed!
But the fact that even I could make some headway on it, being non-fluent, indicates that the phenomenon is almost certainly cross-lingual – though again, it might need to be ‘analogized’ for different kinds of writing systems, such as perhaps shuffling radicals within kanji, or something along those lines.
And, honestly, in the case of kana, since each character represents a syllable rather than having consonants and vowels split into individual letters, it’s possible that the phenomenon could actually be easier in Japanese than in English.
Maybe they should get some Japanese university researchers to look into it!
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Solar systems hate him!
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When you said that, I thought it was an article about the phenomenon, not the literal translation of the jumbled English text in Japanese (well, plus the extra “if you could read that, plz reply!” at the end).
I wonder how many languages got a translation of that text. I remember seeing one in French too back in the days.
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Yeah, it’s a good question. The article my friend sent me had something about it going around 2ch in Japan lately, but I have no clue if that’s something that happened recently (or if the article’s just old). This whole thing is at least 10 years old though, so I’m quite surprised that it’s resurfacing now. Hahaha.
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I think I remember reading that jumbling the insides of words is only legible to a certain extent. Not just because of context (though that certainly helps, especially when one set of letters could be multiple words), but also certain groupings of letters are easier for the brain to sort out than others. If letters that are supposed to go in the first half of the word are still in the first half and letters in the latter half are still in the latter half, then that’s easier to to read than completely scrambling them, which is why the “bnairs,” “fenult,” and “skeepars” in your title are so difficult to read: you’ve got first-half letters at the end and back-half letters at the front. If you pay attention to the longer words in the meme, the letters aren’t that far off from where they’re supposed to be. So, while it’s true that the internal letters of a word can be scrambled, it’s not true that they can be in any order as the meme claims; it’s merely a simplification. (That’s also why typos where two adjacent letters are switched around are so hard to catch. They’re close enough to being in the right place that our brains consider them to be so while only expending the usual amount of energy that reading takes.)
But yeah that “clumping/grouping” functioning in information-processing of our brains isn’t unique to the native-English-speaking brain, it’s a quality of the human brain itself, so it doesn’t surprise me that you can do the same with kana. I have noticed while reading that sometimes, with verbs or い-adjectives, my brain will give me the full word before I’ve actually properly gotten to the end of the conjugation, at least if it’s not too long, because it’s all just patterns. Of course, I’m not right every time because I’m only beginner-intermediate so there’s a lot of info I’m missing, but it happens to some extent. My eyes see it, recognize that it (seems to) fits a pattern, and gives me the info even before I’ve spent the extra energy necessary to read it carefully.
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