Devanagari (the script which is used to write Hindi and several other Indic languages[1]) is very similar in this respect. A fairly modest number of consonant characters are combined with vowel indicators ("mudras"), which are then augmented with various diacritical flourishes to indicate non-plosive quasi-consonant sounds (what do you actually call those?) such as trailing "R"s and "N"s, vowel nasalisations, etc. Just to make life interesting, consonants can be conjoined to indicate glides between them. There are 1,296 possible permutations of conjoins, and when you consider all the possible permutations of vowel mudras and diacriticals, the glyph library can get a bit crazy. Not dissimilar from Hangul, except that the Indic languages have vastly more phonemes than Korean does.
Having picked up Hindi/Devanagari more or less by osmosis, I find that this profusion of glyphs means that my brain processes them differently than it does other alphabets (I also read Cyrillic and the Japanese Kanas). The various strokes seem to take on a "feeling" of associated pronunciation that is both intuitive and very, very precise (since every possible aspect of pronunciation is captured by the script). So when I run across bizarrely conjoined characters (like this[2]), I immediately have an intuitive and generally accurate sense of what sound they ought to produce, even if it takes me quite a while to puzzle out exactly why. This is almost the exact opposite of English, for example, where figuring out the characters is the easy part, while figuring out the sound they create is sometimes impossible.
Having picked up Hindi/Devanagari more or less by osmosis, I find that this profusion of glyphs means that my brain processes them differently than it does other alphabets (I also read Cyrillic and the Japanese Kanas). The various strokes seem to take on a "feeling" of associated pronunciation that is both intuitive and very, very precise (since every possible aspect of pronunciation is captured by the script). So when I run across bizarrely conjoined characters (like this[2]), I immediately have an intuitive and generally accurate sense of what sound they ought to produce, even if it takes me quite a while to puzzle out exactly why. This is almost the exact opposite of English, for example, where figuring out the characters is the easy part, while figuring out the sound they create is sometimes impossible.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari
[2]: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/JanaSansk...