So this is a soft-follow up to my last post about graded readers. Another issue I’ve been having with reading Japanese is dyslexia, it pretty much doesn’t affect normal speech, only my reading. It feels as if I see letters as pictures and I can see it in all transformations simultaneously, so letters like s,z,p,d,b,q,g,L and J are major problems for me when reading, I often get 7 and Z confused too. Kanji **intentionally** have similar elements so It’s a lot more easy to get them mixed up, and when single kanji represent full ideas, mistranslation becomes a problem. Especially if the resolution of the word is an issue, ie. RPGs on 16 bit consoles and digital manga.
Does anyone else have trouble with this? If so have you found a way to mitigate it? Am I the only one who has an issue reading pixel-font kanji?
2 comments
One idea (that you’ve probably already thought of) is to note down different words that you get mixed up. I don’t have dyslexia and I too get words mixed up every now and then. As an example, I recently mistook one of these for the other in my Anki reviews:
変人 and 恋人
I note that down and look at the kanji when I have time to. Although they look similar at first glance, there is a difference that is used to distinguish between them
Your dyslexia sounds worse than my own, in English I tend only to flip letters over horizontally, b and p or d and g/q tending to catch me.
To date my favorite moment of dyslexia was they day I learned that it is multilingual, when I had just spent some time learning hiragana and then wrote a sign to attach to the door of the store I was working at alone that read “Back in 5 minうtes” (though less the top like of the う)
I find with reading Kanji I have to be very slow and deliberate, as I have to focus on individual radicals so as not to often misread things. I am hoping my brain will eventually develop its own shorthand similar for the other two languages I speak, where I don’t need to be so deliberate, but it took quite some time to get there before, and with the far less complex characters of the Latin alphabet.