[simonblack]

You have to be able to understand it on at least one level.

If there is no understanding at all, as in reading a book written in a foreign language, the 'words' are just space-delimited jumbles of letters.

Even then, you can at least try to sound them out, I suppose. But a book written in Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Thai, or Chinese for (say) an American is just a bunch of meaningless squiggles.