Disclaimer: Native Chinese speaker, English as 2nd language.
The picture question
No, it is not an accurate analogy.
If you are reading a Chinese paragraph with some characters in the wrong order, mostly you are just treating the out-of-order texts as unidentifiable symbols and then infer the lost characters based on what you can identify, like how a native Chinese user would read Japanese text with Kanji (漢字) in it. A character in Chinese is the minimum identifiable unit (one that has a distinct meaning and you can make a sound out of it), and while most nouns in modern Chinese are formed of 2 or more characters, you can often guess the word based on the characters ahead of it. Being able to guess the word correctly based on 50% of identifiable characters without any context is what we used to be trained a lot in the elementary school (词语/成语填空, example). It is like the crossword game but instead of 26 options to choose from, you get 5000.
English text with characters in the wrong order is somewhat different from the Chinese case. In the English context, as a word being the minimum identifiable unit, you will not be able to read fast if you go through the same thing in the Chinese context. To still achieve a reasonable reading speed, here are the things that I found important:
- position and sequence of the consonant characters (this allow you to make a sound of the word)
- the word length
- which part of the sentence is the word in
All 3 things are not easily available in the Chinese context.
There is something equivalent to the picture you posted in the Chinese language, for example, sight-reading Traditional Chinese text as a Simplified Chinese user, or vice versa. Or even more, sight-reading the Second Round Simplified Chinese (二简字) characters.
The ability of skimming
I feel English is a reading language, if you are reading an English book, you watch the word and make sound in your brain. But Chinese can be a watching language, take a Chinese book, I can watch over a paragraph and get the meaning of most part.
This is not true. Silent reading and skimming/scanning exist in both English and Chinese. Personally, I can choose from reading slowly with a sound in my brain or just quickly scan the text without any sound based on the type of material and my needs. I prefer silent reading while I'm reading stories, but when researching or reading long technical documents, I'd rather just scan them, find the keywords I need, then read the relevant paragraphs. Your mileage may vary.
you have the ability to skim a Chinese text and still form an understanding
This is true for me.