understanding

I think what is being said here is that when you are trying to read, you cant just learn the letters in the words and think you can effectively put together a sentence. This being said, you cant grasp the most basic part of a human and think that you can therefore justify and understand who and why they are the way they are. The alphabet consists of basic building blocks to how words are formed, and while you need to understand this in order to understand an entire text, the alphabet itself is not enough to give meaning to words or structure to sentences. There may be something about someone (perhaps a situation they have encountered) that acts as an influencing factor and thus a building block for who they have become. This does not mean however that you can understand each and every dynamic of this person simply based on this one section of their life- this did not depict who they are, rather as it meshed with other experiences and emotions based on those experiences, THAT is what more likely decides who someone becomes: the interaction of all these feelings, the FORMING of a person from smaller entities ( a sentence formed from words, and letters).