Comment Re:before the inevitable (Score 1) 246
Speaking of which, some people with dyslexia find that they it only affects English, and not Japanese or Chinese.
Dyslexia is basically a made up metric where teachers can punish students for not being good enough.
It is a well known fact that people who are good in reading only need to see the first one or two characters of a word, and the last one or two, and as long as the chars in the middle are the ones to be expected, and not completely random other chars: they read the words just fine, and do not notice the spelling/garbage in the middle.
Most dyslexia people are extremely good in reading. But they do not see their own spelling mistakes:
a) they know perfectly well what they have written, so reading it several times to see a mistake does not work
b) see above
If you have such reading skills, it is actually preventing you to really memorize how words are actually written. Because you do not care how they are written, when you read them.
As soon as you have an "alphabet" or abugida (Ethopian "alphabet" or Thai/Lao/Burmeese) that is more complicated than Roman/English: people realize instantly "oops, I do not know how to write this".
For example above: "Ethiopian" and "Burmeese", is red underlined. No idea what is wrong. Have to click on it to ask the spell checker
In Thai language a certain sound/word can only be written in a single way. There is no we're, were, where, etc.
Chinese is (laymen explanation) completely pictographic. Japanese uses about 1200 "pictograms" (yes, layman explanation, because not all of those "pictograms" are pictograms, there are also logograms and ideograms)
And here you see what the difference is: "painting a Chinese character" is what this half sentence implied. You have to paint it. Completely different mental process to: writing a few English words. You instantly realize: oh my, I forgot how that character is painted. Or never new it anyway.
So, spelling mistakes could happen on the syllable alphabet level. However the typical error prone combinations as we have in English or German, simply do not exist in Japanese (or Korean). A single syllable is a single character. You simply can not mix that up, if you speak the language.
Of course, when you learn a pictogram, and miss a stroke: it is wrong. Misspelled, probably even misleading as it is a correct different word. Simplest examples: 1 is - and 2 is =. Obviously not a mistake one would make.
But look at the sequence: human, large/tall, dog (in Japanese). Forget one stroke in dog, and it becomes "large", forget one in large and it becomes human. But if you read it again: you see it is the wrong word (most of the time you see it)!