Unlocking Dyslexia in Japanese

3 Comments

1. David Brains on July 11, 2011 at 8:31

   Inter­est­ing, I have mild dyslex­ia myself but have over­come most dif­fi­cul­ties by rig­or­ous train­ing and prac­tice (not with chi­nese char­ac­ters unfor­tu­nate­ly). This might become an impor­tant future con­cept though.

   
   
   
2. Pit on July 16, 2011 at 3:26

   Great progress with dyslexia

   
   
   
3. Carol on August 3, 2011 at 5:21

   This is quite true with oth­er neu­ro­log­i­cal prob­lems. I have a range of neu­ro­log­i­cal prob­lems with vision, APD, motor aprax­ia, and NLD. Despite these prob­lems, I have learned to read Chi­nese and Japan­ese and have noticed that I have gained in spa­tial skills despite my neu­rol­o­gy. I would not rec­om­mend just plung­ing into read­ing char­ac­ters with­out first gain­ing some foun­da­tion­al skills in non­ver­bal areas. I have tried doing learn­ing char­ac­ters with­out foun­da­tion­al skills and it is very tough. I do believe that learn­ing char­ac­ters is a very use­ful exer­cise at an appro­pri­ate point in therapy. 

   There is also a reverse dis­or­der that can be revealed by Ori­en­tal peo­ple try­ing to learn Eng­lish. I taught Eng­lish in Japan for a while and came across one poor soul who was hav­ing trou­ble learn­ing to read Eng­lish. He was star­ing at each word with the same focus as I had when I was try­ing to mem­o­rize char­ac­ters. Look­ing back at this, I believe that he was try­ing to visu­al­ize the whole word and mem­o­rize each word as a sym­bol­ic enti­ty just like you would do with char­ac­ter based lan­guages. We had to start teach­ing him how to look at the Eng­lish lan­guage differently.