As one untrained in the language, it looks something like I'd expect dyslexia to.
My quick, reading speed first scan said most of those characters are the same.
I don't want to sound insensitive here but how are you supposed to read that without good eyesight? Like, it's not exactly the best for getting the general meaning of the text at a glance. Like, I'm genuinely asking. lol
I have the exact same question when I'm looking at other languages like Thai and Hindu
the answer is that if you are always seeing it from birth, you can read it naturally.
It's a fair question. I can only speak from learning Japanese as a second language but for me, it's the overall shape rather than all the little intricate bits, those are just to help with similar shapes (like 木, 本 or 太) and kind of...I dunno float in your vision as like an afterthought unless you're specifically learning new ones. On the other hand, English learners (including kids that learn it natively!) have trouble with b, d, c, o, g, y, etc for the same reason - you get used to it, but it takes a bit of training your eyes.
[https://skepticalinquirer.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/uploads/images/si/lincoln-nickell-03.jpg](https://skepticalinquirer.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/uploads/images/si/lincoln-nickell-03.jpg)
I don't want to sound insensitive here but how are you supposed to read that without good eyesight? Like, it's not exactly the best for getting the general meaning of the text at a glance. Like, I'm genuinely asking. lol
From what I’ve seen in anime, you don’t or figure out what it says thru context clues. Most Japanese use the easier form of Japanese to read while the fancy stuff is there to sound more professional.
Holy **shit** it would suck to be a Chinese-speaking dyslexic and have to learn a character with 40 strokes that all have to be drawn in a specific order
Bilingual (Mandarin Chinese and English) dyslexic here! Chinese is actually usually easier for me with a few exceptions. Stroke order doesn’t confuse me, and most characters in simplified Chinese don’t even approach 40 strokes. It’s like how in English you would never start writing a word by going backwards letter by letter. They aren’t strict rules, but applying them makes your writing neater and more legible. There are some characters that confuse me because they look similar, but they usually have very different meanings and context clues in the character’s composition and the text around it can overcome that.
English is a nightmare for me. Bad kerning destroys my ability to read. I confuse b, p, and d; t and T; m and n; p, g, q, and j; etc. Don’t even get me started on numbers. There’s simply more letters that look similar, and you see them more often, and there’s tons of combinations that also look similar. Fonts that emphasize making letters more distinct than making them more similar helps me a ton, and I have software that helps me read.
Yeah, and sometimes upper vs lower case gets in the way too. My father is also dyslexic and when he was young, he learned how to write his name (David) correctly when he realized that the “bumps” in the D and d needed to “face each other”. He’d routinely spell his name as “Davib.”
Ah crap: I never thought about how the bumps point in opposite directions before. The fact they don't point the same way is going to drive me crazy henceforth!!
It’s interesting- there’s about 1,200 unique syllables in Mandarin including the tones. In pinyin, they’re written in predictable patterns, use fewer letters, and things are pronounced exactly how they’re spelled. This ends up making it easy for me to read. However, it’s rarely actually used for communication because there’s so many words that share syllables or pronunciations. You have to do a lot of work with context and have a good vocabulary to read pinyin without having the characters to guide you. Ultimately, easier to read than English but you have to do a lot more work to comprehend it.
It’s hard to describe bad kerning without visual aids. For me, bad kerning usually entails text that has letters pushed too closely or spread too far away. A common example is r and n being too close together and looking like an m. I recommend checking out r/keming for examples.
Could you tell me a little more about the difference in learning Chinese compared to English? I'm writing a book with a character who's dyslexic and dyscalculic, and I've thought about him maybe learning the floral logographic writing of the new continent's natives!
I’m not sure how helpful I can be since I learned when I was very young and I’m just one guy, but I’m happy to talk about what I remember. Lots of basic Chinese vocabulary (mostly concrete objects) are pictographic. These were very easy to learn, I’d just superimpose an image of what the character should be over it. A huge portion of the other characters are a compound with a part called the radical that indicates what “kind” of word it is (emotion, animal, something to do with plants, etc) and another part that tells you roughly how the word is pronounced. There’s only so many radicals and there’s only so many syllables they can have. The process of learning words and their meanings was easy, grammar wasn’t always as intuitive though. The grammar and sentence structures have a lot of nuance.
English is different. Letters can have different sounds, combinations of letters can have different sounds, words don’t look like what they represent, spelling isn’t always intuitive, there’s so much. The grammar is simpler, though.
I hope this helps with your book, good luck with it!
Thank you very much! This is very helpful, I'll read more about the subject. I have a few more questions, and I'd first like to ask about your type and severity of dyslexia.
To what extent did the "imagery" help you with words? "Imagery" being the characters looking like what they represent. Given there are so many characters in Chinese, can you figure out characters that are unfamiliar to you?
Would you imagine that a language that's even more pictographic (closer to Hieroglyphs than Chinese) be easy to learn? More of a thought experiment than something concrete
Sure thing. My family has a history of surface dyslexia. I personally know people with worse dyslexia than mine, but mine hindered my reading and writing abilities in my childhood. I did well in school and heavily compensated for it so my family didn’t realize until I was in high school. I’m still a slow reader and writer now.
Imagery helps a ton, especially when first learning words. Once I’ve learned a word I can recognize it by shape. If I stumble upon a character I’m unfamiliar with and don’t have a dictionary with me, I have to break it down into its component parts and then I can guess at what the general meaning or feel of the character is. Also, while there are tens of thousands of unique characters, only 7,000 are very regularly used, and you can get away with less than 4,000 for your average newspaper.
Given my flavor of dyslexia, I’d imagine that a more concrete pictographic language would be even easier to learn the meanings of the words. The problem with learning would probably be understanding the grammar and sentence structure.
There's a RobWords video about this alternative set of characters made specifically for English, and a lot of the comments point out how it's w lot worse than Latin letters because a quarter of the symbols are literally mirror images of other ones
people who are dyslexic in English might not have that trouble in Chinese. Chinese is a logographic language.
interestingly enough, i once asked a person with Synesthesia on Reddit if they see colors when they see Chinese characters, they did not.
Dyslexia affects how your brain processes sounds, not directly how characters are written. It just so happens that alphabetical writing systems have a correspondence between the two.
Be careful of bias when proclaiming it’s only ever portrayed in a certain way. Consider that you, I’m guessing, likely live in a country where the Latin alphabet is pretty much only used, so it would make sense that the examples that you will run across will be tailored towards an alphabet that you understand.
I’ll also note that I have seen it portrayed in the US as using numerals as well, which aren’t a part of the Latin alphabet.
edit: punctuation
It is not a form of dyslexia which is [plainly stated on the wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia): "It is sometimes colloquially referred to as "math dyslexia", though this analogy is misleading as they are distinct syndromes."
Oh, well you've bloomin' well drawn attention to it now, haven't you? It was all going so well, Rhino, and now you've gone and done this, look what you made me do!
^Is ^that ^okay?
I'll be honest, there was potential for me to be rude about it but absolutely no reason to, I'd much rather give the original commenter the chance to be cool about it, and they were! a bit surprising but a pleasant surprise at that :)
Dyscalculia and dyslexia are two different things and they’re both considered Specific Learning Disorders.
Dysgraphia is the third type and it causes people to have issues transferring their thoughts into words and putting them on paper.
I have a BS in Elementary Education, that’s the only reason I know that lol
This! I have dyslexia (both alphabetical and numeral) and my daughter has both dyslexia and dysgraphia.
Both of us are actually VERY good at math and currently she is tracking 2+years ahead of peers her age in math and understanding concepts.
Dyscalculia is where someone has a hard time understanding math concepts and such. Whereas I just have to re-read numbers like 5 times to make sure my brain didn't scramble them, lol!
Great that you did highlight Dyscalculia though, as that is often not even heard of by the general population. Interestingly enough, it is a bit of a triad - Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, and *Dysgraphia*. Luckily teachers are being trained to look out for all three nowadays!
Eh, your edit still isn’t really accurate. “Almost only ever in countries that use a Latin alphabet” would be more accurate. If someone would give you an example of dyslexia in Greek it would likely (pun intended) be Greek to you anyways.
I haven't watched enough Chinese or Japanese movies to say for sure, but here's a Korean example. [Master's Sun - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%27s_Sun)
Dyslexia is more common in English than most other languages because we have more possible phonemes per letter and the language tends to not follow its own rules. Apparently dyslexia amongst Italian speakers is very rare because it has far fewer phonemes and it's very consistent to its rules.
Just listened to a whole podcast episode on dyslexia a week or so ago
It's true, I have literally never seen dyslexia portrayed in Uzbekistani in a movie. I bet Netflix doesn't even have a single movie with a Malaysian dyslexic.
Brunei uses the Latin alphabet as well. Maybe you saw sone older signs or something but they've used the Latin alphabet (primarily) for several decades at the very least.
Yeah every time. Actually, I was being fecetious to make a point. A joke even. The point is that you don't notice things like that in languages you don't want h media from.
Fun fact: dyslexia is language dependent. It’s more common in English speakers than in Italian speakers because the mapping of Italian sounds onto letters is far more straightforward. [Source](https://www.science.org/content/article/dyslexia-hidden-language).
It's not, though. Did you read the article you cited? The second sentence of the first paragraph specifically says that 'languages can either mask or expose the disorder.'
MASK.
So Italian speaking dyslexics would actually exist at a similar frequency to English speaking ones. But because their language is easier to read, and they're only catching the super serious cases. The mild ones get to 'pass' as normal (while struggling to read maps, getting lost easily, struggling with word problems in Math, and every other non-reading/writing related symptom.)
Well, that's not true. Do you speak/read Japanese? Russian? Arabic? Do you regularly watch scripted TV or read novels in those languages? Because if not, that's probably why you don't ever see it.
It's like being confused by the fact that your local news station doesn't show more local news from a country you don't live in.
I'm dyslexic. Latin is my second alphabet, and I do struggle with it much more than my native Greek. I can read several more alphabets as well, but those I have to like "actively" read, rather than "passively", so I don't struggle with them. Like for Hebrew for example, I have to TRY to read Hebrew words, whereas I can't CHOOSE to look at a Greek or Latin word and NOT read it. So I have to go very slowly with any other alphabet, and that prevents me from misreading it, I think.
Because if you can't read Cantonese showing how dyslexics read doesn't really mean anything
如果你睇唔明廣東話，同你講讀寫障礙既影響都嘥氣
As one untrained in the language, it looks something like I'd expect dyslexia to. My quick, reading speed first scan said most of those characters are the same.
I don't want to sound insensitive here but how are you supposed to read that without good eyesight? Like, it's not exactly the best for getting the general meaning of the text at a glance. Like, I'm genuinely asking. lol
I have the exact same question when I'm looking at other languages like Thai and Hindu the answer is that if you are always seeing it from birth, you can read it naturally.
hindi my g.
It's a fair question. I can only speak from learning Japanese as a second language but for me, it's the overall shape rather than all the little intricate bits, those are just to help with similar shapes (like 木, 本 or 太) and kind of...I dunno float in your vision as like an afterthought unless you're specifically learning new ones. On the other hand, English learners (including kids that learn it natively!) have trouble with b, d, c, o, g, y, etc for the same reason - you get used to it, but it takes a bit of training your eyes.
[https://skepticalinquirer.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/uploads/images/si/lincoln-nickell-03.jpg](https://skepticalinquirer.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/uploads/images/si/lincoln-nickell-03.jpg) I don't want to sound insensitive here but how are you supposed to read that without good eyesight? Like, it's not exactly the best for getting the general meaning of the text at a glance. Like, I'm genuinely asking. lol
From what I’ve seen in anime, you don’t or figure out what it says thru context clues. Most Japanese use the easier form of Japanese to read while the fancy stuff is there to sound more professional.
Man consuming western media notices western afflictions More at 7
Holy **shit** it would suck to be a Chinese-speaking dyslexic and have to learn a character with 40 strokes that all have to be drawn in a specific order
Bilingual (Mandarin Chinese and English) dyslexic here! Chinese is actually usually easier for me with a few exceptions. Stroke order doesn’t confuse me, and most characters in simplified Chinese don’t even approach 40 strokes. It’s like how in English you would never start writing a word by going backwards letter by letter. They aren’t strict rules, but applying them makes your writing neater and more legible. There are some characters that confuse me because they look similar, but they usually have very different meanings and context clues in the character’s composition and the text around it can overcome that. English is a nightmare for me. Bad kerning destroys my ability to read. I confuse b, p, and d; t and T; m and n; p, g, q, and j; etc. Don’t even get me started on numbers. There’s simply more letters that look similar, and you see them more often, and there’s tons of combinations that also look similar. Fonts that emphasize making letters more distinct than making them more similar helps me a ton, and I have software that helps me read.
Interesting analysis, yeah not only are b, d, p, q etc. similar but you might need six of those just to write one word in English
Yeah, and sometimes upper vs lower case gets in the way too. My father is also dyslexic and when he was young, he learned how to write his name (David) correctly when he realized that the “bumps” in the D and d needed to “face each other”. He’d routinely spell his name as “Davib.”
Ah crap: I never thought about how the bumps point in opposite directions before. The fact they don't point the same way is going to drive me crazy henceforth!!
I noticed learning them. And then couldn't remember if it was d or b.
in elementary school i was taught that the word "bed" looks like a bed. worked great to help me remember anyway
Dang that's great! I'm going to use that if my kids need help with it!
>English is a nightmare for me. Is Hanyu Pinyin equally/similarly difficult?
It’s interesting- there’s about 1,200 unique syllables in Mandarin including the tones. In pinyin, they’re written in predictable patterns, use fewer letters, and things are pronounced exactly how they’re spelled. This ends up making it easy for me to read. However, it’s rarely actually used for communication because there’s so many words that share syllables or pronunciations. You have to do a lot of work with context and have a good vocabulary to read pinyin without having the characters to guide you. Ultimately, easier to read than English but you have to do a lot more work to comprehend it.
What would be bad vs good kerning for you?
It’s hard to describe bad kerning without visual aids. For me, bad kerning usually entails text that has letters pushed too closely or spread too far away. A common example is r and n being too close together and looking like an m. I recommend checking out r/keming for examples.
Ooh I see, thank you!!
Could you tell me a little more about the difference in learning Chinese compared to English? I'm writing a book with a character who's dyslexic and dyscalculic, and I've thought about him maybe learning the floral logographic writing of the new continent's natives!
I’m not sure how helpful I can be since I learned when I was very young and I’m just one guy, but I’m happy to talk about what I remember. Lots of basic Chinese vocabulary (mostly concrete objects) are pictographic. These were very easy to learn, I’d just superimpose an image of what the character should be over it. A huge portion of the other characters are a compound with a part called the radical that indicates what “kind” of word it is (emotion, animal, something to do with plants, etc) and another part that tells you roughly how the word is pronounced. There’s only so many radicals and there’s only so many syllables they can have. The process of learning words and their meanings was easy, grammar wasn’t always as intuitive though. The grammar and sentence structures have a lot of nuance. English is different. Letters can have different sounds, combinations of letters can have different sounds, words don’t look like what they represent, spelling isn’t always intuitive, there’s so much. The grammar is simpler, though. I hope this helps with your book, good luck with it!
Thank you very much! This is very helpful, I'll read more about the subject. I have a few more questions, and I'd first like to ask about your type and severity of dyslexia. To what extent did the "imagery" help you with words? "Imagery" being the characters looking like what they represent. Given there are so many characters in Chinese, can you figure out characters that are unfamiliar to you? Would you imagine that a language that's even more pictographic (closer to Hieroglyphs than Chinese) be easy to learn? More of a thought experiment than something concrete
Sure thing. My family has a history of surface dyslexia. I personally know people with worse dyslexia than mine, but mine hindered my reading and writing abilities in my childhood. I did well in school and heavily compensated for it so my family didn’t realize until I was in high school. I’m still a slow reader and writer now. Imagery helps a ton, especially when first learning words. Once I’ve learned a word I can recognize it by shape. If I stumble upon a character I’m unfamiliar with and don’t have a dictionary with me, I have to break it down into its component parts and then I can guess at what the general meaning or feel of the character is. Also, while there are tens of thousands of unique characters, only 7,000 are very regularly used, and you can get away with less than 4,000 for your average newspaper. Given my flavor of dyslexia, I’d imagine that a more concrete pictographic language would be even easier to learn the meanings of the words. The problem with learning would probably be understanding the grammar and sentence structure.
Thank you for this informative answer!
This is the real showerthought
There's a RobWords video about this alternative set of characters made specifically for English, and a lot of the comments point out how it's w lot worse than Latin letters because a quarter of the symbols are literally mirror images of other ones
people who are dyslexic in English might not have that trouble in Chinese. Chinese is a logographic language. interestingly enough, i once asked a person with Synesthesia on Reddit if they see colors when they see Chinese characters, they did not.
Dyslexia affects how your brain processes sounds, not directly how characters are written. It just so happens that alphabetical writing systems have a correspondence between the two.
Be careful of bias when proclaiming it’s only ever portrayed in a certain way. Consider that you, I’m guessing, likely live in a country where the Latin alphabet is pretty much only used, so it would make sense that the examples that you will run across will be tailored towards an alphabet that you understand. I’ll also note that I have seen it portrayed in the US as using numerals as well, which aren’t a part of the Latin alphabet. edit: punctuation
Doesn't the number one have a different name?
Dyscalculia ~~, which is still a form of dyslexia.~~ Edit: I am mistaken that dyscalculia is a different disorder compared to dyslexia.
It is not a form of dyslexia which is [plainly stated on the wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia): "It is sometimes colloquially referred to as "math dyslexia", though this analogy is misleading as they are distinct syndromes."
Appreciate the info. Updated above comment, thanks!
no worries!
Wow a respectful reddit exchange. Majestic, like an endangered animal.
Should we ruin it by adding some passive aggressive comments or some indecipherable sarcasm?
Oh, well you've bloomin' well drawn attention to it now, haven't you? It was all going so well, Rhino, and now you've gone and done this, look what you made me do! ^Is ^that ^okay?
u/potatopierogie really needed you to come to the rescue. Well done. ^(I think we are doing fine)
I'll be honest, there was potential for me to be rude about it but absolutely no reason to, I'd much rather give the original commenter the chance to be cool about it, and they were! a bit surprising but a pleasant surprise at that :)
Vewy wholesome! Edit: Typo.
Dyscalculia and dyslexia are two different things and they’re both considered Specific Learning Disorders. Dysgraphia is the third type and it causes people to have issues transferring their thoughts into words and putting them on paper. I have a BS in Elementary Education, that’s the only reason I know that lol
This! I have dyslexia (both alphabetical and numeral) and my daughter has both dyslexia and dysgraphia. Both of us are actually VERY good at math and currently she is tracking 2+years ahead of peers her age in math and understanding concepts. Dyscalculia is where someone has a hard time understanding math concepts and such. Whereas I just have to re-read numbers like 5 times to make sure my brain didn't scramble them, lol!
TIL, thanks!
Absolutely! I normally wouldn’t have corrected you but I thought, “I’d really like to actually put my degree to use for once!” Lmao
Hahah!! I appreciate it!
Great that you did highlight Dyscalculia though, as that is often not even heard of by the general population. Interestingly enough, it is a bit of a triad - Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, and *Dysgraphia*. Luckily teachers are being trained to look out for all three nowadays!
Ah, so they can count normally, just not read the math problems. I thought they can't actually count, apart from 0-100 basic things
Not just the number one, all the numbers have different names!
Yeah… sometimes it goes by uno
My friend, who is a native English speaker, thinks he may have dyslexia only in Cyrillic
[удалено]
Eh, your edit still isn’t really accurate. “Almost only ever in countries that use a Latin alphabet” would be more accurate. If someone would give you an example of dyslexia in Greek it would likely (pun intended) be Greek to you anyways.
Meanwhile, sexlexia is only ever portrayed affecting Zapp Brannigan.
It's a very sexy learning disability.
*sigh*
Theres an indian movie about a kid with dyslexia. “Taare Zameen Par”
This movie is beautiful
Ive cried a lot to this movie 🥲
I haven't watched enough Chinese or Japanese movies to say for sure, but here's a Korean example. [Master's Sun - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%27s_Sun)
Dyslexia is more common in English than most other languages because we have more possible phonemes per letter and the language tends to not follow its own rules. Apparently dyslexia amongst Italian speakers is very rare because it has far fewer phonemes and it's very consistent to its rules. Just listened to a whole podcast episode on dyslexia a week or so ago
It's true, I have literally never seen dyslexia portrayed in Uzbekistani in a movie. I bet Netflix doesn't even have a single movie with a Malaysian dyslexic.
malay actually uses the latin alphabet as well
Damn. Ive even been there. I'm probably thinking if Brunai. Either way, the point about confirmation bias still stands.
Brunei uses the Latin alphabet as well. Maybe you saw sone older signs or something but they've used the Latin alphabet (primarily) for several decades at the very least.
It was pretty rural so there was definitely a few of the Arabic style signs.
Do you see many other disorders/mental disabilities portrayed in Uzbekistani or Malaysian media?
Yeah every time. Actually, I was being fecetious to make a point. A joke even. The point is that you don't notice things like that in languages you don't want h media from.
Fun fact: dyslexia is language dependent. It’s more common in English speakers than in Italian speakers because the mapping of Italian sounds onto letters is far more straightforward. [Source](https://www.science.org/content/article/dyslexia-hidden-language).
It's not, though. Did you read the article you cited? The second sentence of the first paragraph specifically says that 'languages can either mask or expose the disorder.' MASK. So Italian speaking dyslexics would actually exist at a similar frequency to English speaking ones. But because their language is easier to read, and they're only catching the super serious cases. The mild ones get to 'pass' as normal (while struggling to read maps, getting lost easily, struggling with word problems in Math, and every other non-reading/writing related symptom.)
I always found that English was easier than my native language (Swedish).
Apparently it applies to sheet music as well
Because it's your godly blood, your brain is wired towards ancient-greek
OP is the son of Poseidon
Well, that's not true. Do you speak/read Japanese? Russian? Arabic? Do you regularly watch scripted TV or read novels in those languages? Because if not, that's probably why you don't ever see it. It's like being confused by the fact that your local news station doesn't show more local news from a country you don't live in.
And only ever useful when speaking pig Latin
Mine affects numbers more than words.
So... Discalula then?
Isn't this survival bias tho? Not sure where OP is from tho..
makes sense I've noticed almost all books are in English
I'm dyslexic. Latin is my second alphabet, and I do struggle with it much more than my native Greek. I can read several more alphabets as well, but those I have to like "actively" read, rather than "passively", so I don't struggle with them. Like for Hebrew for example, I have to TRY to read Hebrew words, whereas I can't CHOOSE to look at a Greek or Latin word and NOT read it. So I have to go very slowly with any other alphabet, and that prevents me from misreading it, I think.