[evertedsphere]

Partial counterpoint: if you were to mutate characters (by changing less distinctive components to other vaguely similar-looking ones) or to reorder the order of characters in hanzi/kanji compounds, I would imagine that a native speaker would still be able to read them with some difficulty.

I can attempt to produce a Japanese example by going to town on an example from Jreibun, but note that I am far from native:

後食に罠くなるのは生里像現なので壁けることはできないが、午後の事士の校率が干がるので木っている。

As far as I'm concerned, swapping out the radicals doesn't hurt that much (this is usually a negative, since it leads you to confuse character pairs like 候 and 侯, especially if you don't practice writing) and swapping the order of characters is a bit more annoying.

That said, a Mandarin one would be more convincing, since reordering the various markers that serve the roles of Japanese verb conjugations would be less disruptive than turning できなかった into っぎかてなた, which I did not do for that reason.

--

(The original sentence was 食後に眠くなるのは生理現象なので避けることはできないが、午後の仕事の効率が下がるので困っている。)