repoman

Sorry if this problem sounds strange,but I have asked many Japanese people I know if there are many dyslexic people there, and they didn't even know it existed. Perhaps I have not made it clear what dyslexia actually is. Or perhaps there is something about the way an alphabet vs ideograms work in the brain that makes dyslexia fairly common here in America compared to Japan. It just seems strange that Japanese say they have less problems with reading than americans say they have given just how complex the writing is.

Of course Japan does have a tendency of not letting problems out into the open.

Also, I was wondering if anyone know if dysexia is at all similar to push and pop stacks going haywire (in a computer programming sense.)

Vorkosigan

I've been working in Taiwan 12 years -- there are no problems in the US that are not found here, including Dyslexia.

Huginn

The english language seems to have been specifically designed to be incompatible with the dyslexic brain. Frequently, words are not spelled how they sound and do not sound how they are spelled. This means that students must use kinds of memory that dyslexics have difficulty with (remembering sequences of abstract symbols).

Also, the alphabet has many pairs of letters that are mirrors of each other. (d/b, p/q, p/b, q/d, u/n, w/m). Dyslexics frequently have difficulty recognising which of the pair they are looking at or need to use.

If there were a scale of dyslexia friendly languages, English would be very close to the bottom. Japanese, on the other hand, would be near the top of the scale.

When initially learning japanese, children use hiragana where symbols directly relate to sounds (one symbol per syllable). So a japanese child need only remember the sound made by a word and not necessarily the sequence of symbols. (the dyslexic brain has a much easier time remembering sounds than sequences of abstract symbols).

There are fewer mirrored symbols in the japanese language as well, so there is another advantage.

Things get a little more complicated when the child is introduced to Kanji. Kanji are chinese symbols which are fairly complicated and make up parts of words or whole words. While this may seem like a really cruel punishment for a dyslexic after the ease of hiragana it actually isn't so bad. Many dyslexics I know have learned to read by recognising what the words look like rather than what sequence of letters are in them. So learning kanji involves memorising distinctive images which quite often resemble what they look like (for example 木 moku which resembles a tree and means the same), is actually quite easy for a dyslexic.

Japan has as many dyslexics as anywhere else but the language is easier for them and so their problems are not noticed as frequently. Japanese isn't the only 'dyslexic friendly' language Spanish, Finnish and Czech are also fairly good but as far as I know Japanese is the friendliest.

Huginn (dyslexic student of the Japanese language)

Gurdur

Additional to Huginn's remarks:

It has been shown that Japanese and Chinese speakers have better symbolic memory than English speakers - most likely as a result of the process of learning all the characters.

Coragyps

There's an article in Science last year that addresses how dyslexia shows up in Italian, French, and English. The Italians have an advantage, like Huginn's comments implied. The URL is too long to work, but the reference is
The online magazine is free for a few more days - you just need to register to read it.

Edited for url.

[ June 20, 2002: Message edited by: Coragyps ]</p>

seebs

An interesting data point:

When I was studying Chinese in China, some of my friends and I discovered something.

Every foreigner we talked to could easily recognize Chinese characters written backwards (left-right reversal) as characters, and could almost always pick out which ones they were.

Every native speaker we talked to stared blankly at our pictures, and couldn't understand what we were doing, even when we tried to explain it. If we showed them the same marks in a mirror, they were stunned. They still couldn't tell a backwards character from a backwards not-a-character.

Not enough sample space, but a fascinating result.

Vorkosigan

<strong>

Every native speaker we talked to stared blankly at our pictures, and couldn't understand what we were doing, even when we tried to explain it. If we showed them the same marks in a mirror, they were stunned. They still couldn't tell a backwards character from a backwards not-a-character.

Not enough sample space, but a fascinating result.</strong>[/QUOTE]

Inasmuch as backwards (and stretched, folded, and otherwise topologically mangled) characters are commonly used here in Taiwan in advertizing for humourous effect, I have some trouble understanding this story. But my own experience with foreigners discussing Chinese with locals is that usually the foreigners write the character wrong, and of course the Chinese don't get it. Also, the foreigners are often taken in by Chinese politeness. Perhaps they were just humoring you, seebs.....

seebs

Inasmuch as backwards (and stretched, folded, and otherwise topologically mangled) characters are commonly used here in Taiwan in advertizing for humourous effect, I have some trouble understanding this story. But my own experience with foreigners discussing Chinese with locals is that usually the foreigners write the character wrong, and of course the Chinese don't get it. Also, the foreigners are often taken in by Chinese politeness. Perhaps they were just humoring you, seebs.....[/QB][/QUOTE]

That's possible. We tried it repeatedly, and we all verified that we were definitely producing characters which looked right in a mirror. I never saw any topologically mangled characters used; perhaps that's something that people started doing in Taiwan.

We did occasionally have a *lot* of trouble communicating. We had one teacher who absolutely positively would not believe that we could understand concepts such as "pollution", even when we showed her the word we meant in a dictionary. I think she believed that, since we wrote at the level of 8-year-old children, we thought like that too.