Learning HBRW: How great is the tetragrammaton?

My Hebrew is going decent. I can sound my way through sentences, but I wonder if I'll ever be able to look down at a page of Hebrew characters and have words jump out at me like they do when I look at Greek now.

The last unit I looked at was about the Hebrew name for God. It's sweet how they don't put in vowel points and just have the consonant series YHWH ("the tetragrammaton") -- leaving out the vowel points makes the word distinctive on the page -- and it's sweet how when you get to it, you just say the word "Adonay" ('my lord') instead, the consonants of which look nothing like the consonants in the tetragrammaton, they're completely different. I've always known that that was Jewish practice, but it's crazy different once you actually get to learning the Hebrew and do it yourself.