I am new to Japanese, just started in December, and am currently learning Kanji, with all the different readings and meanings.
So there is a question I’ve been asking myself about it : Do the Japanese read Kanji and especially Kana like we would read the Roman alphabet ? Without the need to really think about the meaning and how you’ll say it ? Like I would say A is A and B is B.
I don’t know if it’s easy to answer my question, but thanks in advance !
For the kana I would say yes, definitely. Even though they are syllabaries and not alphabets, the basic principle is the same : a shape assigned to a sound, it’s just a matter of habit to be able to recognize them immediately. After all no one is born with any knowledge of any writing system, our brain has to learn. For the kanji, I would say it’s also just a matter of habit and study time, just in a way bigger scale. When I see a word that I really know at one hundred percent, like 花吹雪, I can read them instantly just like any word in the Roman alphabet.
It must surely be more complicated for the names. I remember asking that question on an other thread, and someone answered me that if you don’t have the furigana above a Japanese name you can’t be sure at 100% of the way it’s pronounced since every kanji has different readings.
In an episode of Bleach, there is this scene where Ichigo reads for the first time the name of an other student in his class, Uryû Ishida. The name is written like this : 石田 雨竜 ; at first Ichigo thinks that 雨竜 is pronounced あめたつ instead of うりゅう, before being corrected by an other student.
So I think that this problem with the names may happen sometimes, and also if someone just doesn’t remember the reading of a particular kanji since there are so many of them. Or a case where a kanji can be read in different ways and each option is correct, like 私 that can be pronounced わたし or わたくし ; if you don’t have furigana you can’t be sure. Since I was talking about Bleach I had this exact case yesterday, an episode where a character talks in a formal way ; I was looking at the subtitles but there were no furigana, and the character said わたくし instead of わたし. These little ambiguities are parts of this language’s beauty I guess.
Just my two cents, I am not Japanese 
I feel like you’re describing a slightly different issue, whether or not someone can look at a text and then read it aloud. OP was asking about looking at a text and understanding its meaning.
And the answer, OP, is yes, absolutely. It somtimes seems like moon runes coming at it as a foreing learner, but look at it this way: Written Japanese is the same as written English or written German or written Arabic or written Greek, it is purely a means of storing information in a way that can be retrieved again by another person at a later date. If retrieving meaning from written Japanese was not as straightforward for Japanese speakers as reading written English is for English speakers, it would have been replaced by an improved system a long time ago. (Though, come to think of it, there have actually been updates released along the way, from the introduction of kana back in the day, to the big kana overhaul post-WWII.)
Agreed on the ease of reading once you’ve learned how, but I do think there are differences between writing systems in how easy they are to learn and correspondingly how much time gets eaten up in the education system with the basics of “learn to read and write” that could in theory be spent on other things. Japanese is obviously pretty bad here, but English with its mess of spellings isn’t great either. There’s not much incentive to change things for this sort of reason, though, because everybody in a position to make that change has already paid the sunk costs of learning to read using the existing system. (I’m sure there’s research on learning difficulty for native speakers by writing system, but I failed to find any because it’s swamped by results about L2 learners and non-comparative stuff about English Lang education.)
I just realized that I’m so super slow with Japanese. I was playing Dragon Quest with the highest battle speed. In Japanese I could barely follow the text and missed some lines. I tried that in German (native language): It didn’t even feel fast.
A is Apple,Able, All, Arm, Ant. All of these are a little different but we automatically know from constant practice how to read them.
So in that sense yes, Japanese is like that. While there are multiple readings (for some kanji especially….), with enough practice it starts coming at you immediately for the most part.
I know I often just have the meaning and reading just come to me while I’m reading, with no thinking needed - at least for certain words.
And if it’s a kanji out of context, just on its own, I kind of default to one pronunciation - in the same way that when I see “a” I default to one sound even though it can be many.
And sure sometimes there are multiple options, like 私 or even 明日, where you have to pick up on the formality level to figure out the right reading. But you learn to figure it out. Just like the English phrase “I’d read it” can be “I had read[red] it” or “I would read[reed] it”, but you figure it out often with little to no thought, just based on the context:
“If I could, I’d read it right now”
“I was going to borrow this book but I realized I’d read it already”
Thanks y’all ! Helped me a lot !
I think it is true. I once read we don’t even read letters, we recognize words separated by spaces. The letters don’t even have to be in the correct order. Olny the frist and lsat lteter of a wrod msut be in the crroect psotioin in odrer to raed a txet, which proves that we do not read the letters but recognize entire words. Same with kanji. You recognize what it looks like and immediately read it. The radicals, lines, components,. mnemonics are only necessary to learn the words, once you learned them you will no longer need the mnemonics.
After just a bit of reading practice on a VN I find that you start taking up the most common expression like 彼女 or 誰か as “words” without thinking because you see them every other sentence.
Precisely. The real insight is not that Japanese people read like us, is that’s we read like them! We only decipher letter by letter for completely unknown words, for everything else our brain recognizes full words and even sometimes common sequences of words.
If you keep practicing I’m sure that within a few months basic words will be like that for you in Japanese too. 今、本屋に行きたい。 Those basic kanji come up all over the place even in beginner material, you’ll manage to read them (as in, know what they mean and how to pronounce them) effortlessly soon enough. Then it’s a slow grind to ever more niche and complex vocab and kanji…
It actually feels magical sometimes. You look at some scribbles. and a meaning and reading just appears in your head. Where do you know that word from? Unsure, but you do. Especially with common joked about characters, like 鬱, that barely renders.