Yes, the premise of the thought experiment is that the man doesn't understand Chinese but the system "appears" to understand Chinese. This is used to argue that because the man doesn't understand Chinese, the apparent "understanding" is not "real." What I'm saying is that the reason the man doesn't understand Chinese is that the level of abstraction of which he's conscious of is not the level at which understanding happens, and I'm asserting that this is not a convincing argument against the system "truly" understanding Chinese as a whole.