don’t people like the Chinese and Japanese learn by sight..they certainly can’t use phonics.
Actually the japanese use both traditional chinese characters (kanji in Japanese) and a syllabary system that is phoenitic (hiragana). They found that the Chinese wasn sufficient to cover all aspects of the Japanese language so they combined them. They did it again in the 1900s when they created a romanization syllabary specifically to be used for foreign words transliterated into Japanese...the new syllabary was called katakana. Katakana has the exact same pronunciation as hiragana but a slightly different set of characters. So while the Kanji has an idea behind it’s origin, the hiragana and katakana has phoenitics. Oh and if they use western letters then it is called romanji.
Interestingly I was worried about my younger daughter reading at one point because she was a bit slower than her sister who devoured books by age 5. The school was using sight words to a limited degree and I was driving phoenetics at home when I read to them prior to bed time. One day I walked into her room and she looked up at me from a book with eyes as big as saucers. “Dad,” she said, “it’s like a movie in my head.” My reply was a big grin and “Well I don’t need to be concerned about that anymore do I.” Ever since she’s been reading like crazy but does tend to be a bit more selective in what she will invest her time in compared to her sister.