Okay, here's an interesting thing--with unfamiliar words whose pronunciation is foreign enough to me (for example, lots of foreign words, especially names), my brain sort of shrugs and gives up on the phonics thing and just looks at the whole word. Not always--with Spanish, I always sound the words out. But with, say, a Chinese name, I pretty much just take a mental screenshot of the name instead of figuring out how to pronounce it.