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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> It’s therefore possible for people who learn to read and write in Chinese or Japanese to have no idea they have dyslexia until they later begin to learn English and are forced into reading and writing in a totally different way.

This is particularly interesting because the argument is that English reveals more dyslexia because it is irregularly phonetic -- but the Chinese characters used in Chinese and Japanese aren't phonetic at all. But they're still made of components (including radicals) arranged in horizontal and vertical orders.

I would have assumed that dyslexia would be just as much of a problem regarding the ordering of components within characters. Anyone have any idea why it's apparently not? Or is the article wrong?

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There's a book that came out some years ago, Proust and the Squid, by Maryanne Wolf, on the subject of reading and the brain. Part of the book discusses dyslexia. Now, I read it years ago, the book is fairly dense at times, and neuroscience is not my field. With those disclaimers in mind, let me offer a guess.

Paraphrasing wildly, Wolf said that writing as a technology is something we built by repurposing different areas of our brain that evolved in response to our pre-literate environment. Our brains didn't evolve to read. Reading is one of those marvelous things that we hairless apes have managed by pushing ourselves. It's what we do.

Dyslexia is, essentially, to put it in computer terms, the result of slow throughput in the cognitive system we've built from our (spoken) language part of the brain and our visual-spatial part (which probably evolved in response to recognizing details on the landscape, etc). In most people, when they learn to read, the brain "wires up" this system in an efficient way. It's wired up cleanly. In people with dyslexia, the wiring is more like a rat's nest — or maybe "spaghetti" would be a better way of putting it. (Again, I'm paraphrasing!)

Dyslexia is more prevalent among left-handed people. It seems like (if I remember left and right sides of the brain correctly), language is on one side of the brain, and visual-spatial is on the other. Now, left-handed people are right-brain dominant. And, if I remember correctly, left-brain dominant people are better at wiring up their brains, when the "wiring" needs to cross over from one side of the brain to the other. In general, right-handed people do a better job at building a "system" than left-handed.

Regarding Chinese and Japanese, the article talked about the way these writing systems are taught: namely, students are made to sound out what they're writing, over and over. So, if I were to guess, this slow and deliberate practice recruits all the parts of the brain involved more energetically, and as a result helps the individual compensate for any innate, relative deficiency in building a cognitive system that coordinates left and right sides of the brain: meaning, wiring up a brain that can read.

That's my best guess. Speaking out loud while learning to write may be the critical difference.

My Japanese wife says that she never really spoke anything while she was practicing kanji, and I don't even know how you'd be sounding out characters as you write them because an individual character can have very many strokes that aren't phonetic at all, plus an individual Kanji can have many many pronunciations; so trying to "sound out" Kanji doesn't really make any sense from the start. I think this article's description of Japanese education is probably inaccurate.

Chinese is partially phonetic (pronunciation can be guessed to some extent from radicals). Katakana and hiragana are completely phonetic AFAIK.

Kana are (mostly) syllabaries, which should make them a lot easier for dyslexics.

> Chinese is partially phonetic

That's not true in any meaningful way, as far as I know. I took several years of Mandarin courses, and there were exactly zero times I was able to guess a pronunciation from a radical... and I'd learned 1,000+ characters by that point.

Perhaps that's true in some areas of technical vocabulary? Or there are a handful of examples that have the same pronunciation. But I'm pretty sure that trying to guess a pronunciation from a radical, you'd be wrong 99% of the time.

Most hanzi in Mandarin are partly phonetic. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Phono-seman.... It's generally not based on radical, but on the so called phonetic component. See say 元, 远, 园, 院.

As the comment you're replying says, it's not meaningful (at least from the perspective of language learning). For example, the characters you give are still pronounced differently; yuan2, yuan3, yuan2, yuan4.

That's why I said it's partly phonetic. From the perspective of language learning I think it's extremely helpful to be able to intuit from the phonetic component that they will sound similar. I would also say that the tonal pronunciation differences are not that significant as the main distinguisher in Mandarin is the usage of compound words (2+ hanzi). Consider the fact that in China there are very few people who speak in the "proper" correct CCTV way. Most people will have large tonal variations from dialect etc. Compound words are the key to intelligibility.

On the topic of tones, I'd like to clarify something. It's true that few speak in the CCTV way, but to each Mandarin tone there are several realizations (perhaps altered by context) that people recognize as belonging to the same tone. That is, there are in Mandarin (and in any modern Chinese language), tonemes.

Note that when we survey the multiple dialects in China, we see that they more or less preserve the Middle Chinese 4 tones, even though the tones' realizations have evolved so greatly such that the Middle Chinese tones' actual realizations are but unreconstructible.

I think this is a strong indication that dyslexia is associated with the more analytical parts of text processing. The Chinese characters are likely processed in a more synthetic, whole-image kind of way.

There is some interesting research on this using fmri: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aRfWcfCYKM

You may find this interesting:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/its-all-ch...

"Researchers looking at the brains of dyslexic Chinese children have discovered that the disorder in that language often stems from two separate, independent problems: sound and visual perception."

> I would have assumed that dyslexia would be just as much of a problem regarding the ordering of components within characters. Anyone have any idea why it's apparently not?

The article explains it in terms of teaching methods: it sounds like the method they describe involves a consistent relation of the order of strokes to the parts of the word being recited with it; that would make the phonetic associations (even though the symbology is not phonetic) consistent. A consistent phonetic writing system (which is likewise less likely to reveal dyslexia) has a similar feature. English is taught phonetically, but has intense phonetic irregularities, so the phonetic connections at present but ambiguous. If phonetic associations with the symbol through learning have an anchoring effect, that would seem to explain the identified effect.

I don't think that this article is accurate. A single character in Japanese generally has many entirely different readings depending on context, and the strokes have pretty much no relation to any of those pronunciations; my Japanese wife says she didn't speak aloud kanji while learning them, and I can't even imagine how a 15+ stroke kanji would be "sounded out" as you wrote it if the form you're pronouncing is a single syllable.

> But they're still made of components (including radicals) arranged in horizontal and vertical orders.

Yes, you have symbols in Japanese, but each of those symbols can also be written out in hiragana (their phonetic script). And there are no special rules for pronouncing hiragana that change depending on the word (with a handful of caveats). Today's Japanese is very, very straightforward and easy to pronounce. Now, please note that I am not talking about accents - having an accent is a whole another issue that will take loads of practice to get rid of.

I was under the impression that the majority of written Japanese (e.g. in newspapers etc.) is kanji, which isn't phonetic at all.

So I'm a bit confused about how Japanese is straightforward and easy to pronounce -- isn't it actually one of the hardest languages in the world to memorize how to pronounce, behind Chinese?

I know there are the phonetic hiragana and katakana, but they're used particularly with children and language learners. An adult reader has to memorize ~2,500 characters non-phonetically, no?

Yes, it's true that reading and writing at an adult level requires knowing at least the "common" ones, about two to three thousand Kanji characters.

However, Hiragana and Katakana are not just for children or students. They form a significant portion of everyday text, and in fact necessary for constructing sentences properly in Japanese. For example, many/most grammatical particles like "of", "in", "to", "from", are written in Hiragana. And foreign/imported words are usually in Katakana.

Regarding the ease of pronunciation - I think the grandparent comment was talking about the sounds of the language, not about memorizing how to read and pronounce the text.

Japanese speech is composed of a fairly small set of simple sounds, similar to Spanish. Having taught both Japanese and English, I would say the latter has many more tricky sounds - like th in "the", or ar in arm (especially how Americans say it). In contrast, if one knows the sounds of each Hiragana (consonant + vowel combination), they cover almost all of Japanese speech.

I'd say Japanese is even more difficult than Chinese - at least with Chinese the majority of characters are predictably one syllable with the same pronunciation regardless of context; in Japanese you get entirely different pronunciations depending on the context, with a ton of exceptions.

That said the actual sounds are few and really easy to vocalize (if you ignore pitch accent). Adults do use kana for certain words and in between words, but it's true that you do need to know a lot of kanji to read things fluently.

You're on the right track. Individual words in Japanese can be represented in three ways:

1) Pure hiragana 2) Pure Kanji 3) A mixture of Kanji + hiragana

#3 comes into picture especially when conjugating verbs. As the base verb is written in Kanji but the various forms are tacked on in hiragana.

The important bit : The kanji symbol essentially just compresses the hiragana into a symbol, but all words that contain kanji can be uncompressed back to hiragana.

Japanese is definitely hard to learn, but it is not hard to pronounce. The hardness comes from the fact that the Kanji can have multiple 'readings' depending on the context.

Source: Studying/struggling with Japanese for the last 5 years.

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