Dotsies (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Dotsies (2012)

dotsies.org

67 pointstosh22 comments

It seems like the correspondence should be something other a-z. Something like making the vowels or more common letters more distinctive. E.g., making the vowels the lightest weight, that is make aeiou use the single dot letters dotsies uses for abcde.

Was about to pass this off until I starting reading the sample near the bottom of the page that gradually teaches you. It actually amazed me that I could sort of read it halfway through. I can't get to the end though, but at least I have an idea of the difficulty level to read it naturally.

Woah that is true, it's amazing. I made the same back when I was learning Hiragana as a native Spanish (pronunciation is the same in both Spanish and Japanese!) so I could easily read them, but it didn't work nearly as well.

The way I ended up doing is by learning whole words and then a lot of practice. It is similar to what the author is doing here, just they do it with the most frequent words first such as "the", "it", "a". Really clever indeed. Now if this was applied to Korean it'd be awesome (:

Couldn't get past "if you can read this, keep going."

Update: it's just because I was doing it on my phone. Having a blast learning this!

I cannot tell if this is a practical joke or what. At first, I tried to learn it in earnest but then I fell totally apart and virtually threw my hands up. Either I have some sort of learning disability or this is there to simply waste my time.

Is this a real thing?

Have you tried using a spaced repetition system? Sometimes it takes the brain a couple exposures until you "get" it. Otherwise you might think of ways to make the learning more engaging or stimulating: if you can present the same information in a different way, that might work better :)

Reminds me of Marain, which I actually wish was in use:

http://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/marain.htm

As a note, the further reading links are dead.

They are available [0] on Web Archive, if anyone is interested.

0. http://web.archive.org/web/20080524200838/http://homepages.c...

Title shoud be `Dotsies - dot based read optimized font (2012)`.

I learned it back then. Used it for a while as a privacy feature for my phone.

how was it? easy to read after a hwile?

I whished the downloadable font would be the "densest" setting, not just abc encoding

I can read 10-20 words per minute. The main problem is that you cannot "scan" for a word.

Why not follow the 'natural' scheme of binary? A picture is worth n words:

http://i.imgur.com/3XIMXcD.png (added the 0-9 digits for emotional effect)

I can't seem to put my finger on what makes a scheme more 'readable' than another.

Edit: Reminds me a lot of Chinese, but in this case there's a clear procedure to decode glyphs as a word!

> I can't seem to put my finger on what makes a scheme more 'readable' than another.

I think one constraint is that the meaning of glyphs should be translation invariant. But this does not hold for dotsies either (the glyph for "a" could be interpreted as "b" depending on where the baseline is chosen). I wonder how subscripting or superscripting works with this font :)

I like this. I spent 15 minutes playing the game and I feel like I can pick up the basics. I'll try the bookmarklet from time to time.

Korean is structured this way

I don't see any similarity.

It's a loose similarity to be sure. In Korean, syllables are written as a constricted glyph. In dottsies, words are written as a constructed glyph.

That would be like saying cursive Latin alphabet produces constructed glyphs. Dotsies is just an alphabet - no letter or syllable acts as a modifier on any other.

imagelike alphabets and languages are harder to process, takes more time, not effective

signs needs to be distinct

Under this system the words are what become easier to distinguish (after some practice?), not the symbols.

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