[gizmo686]

I am not familiar with Chinese, but in Japanese, the characters do not necessarily map 1 to 1 with words, so you have some words that are composed of multiple characters. For example, "adult" would be written as 大人, which are the characters "big" and "person".

[jessriedel]

Sure, but the script speed-reading advantage only comes at the level of having single symbols for single meaning. Once you need to combine symbols to get the (additional) meanings, you're not any faster than phonetics.

[jiyinyiyong]

Yeah, just like the words "handwriting", "television", "sunshine", "seafood", the meaning of the whole character can be inferred from the parts.