English is a stupid language.

[miss_squiddy]

Here's an interesting thing from Dr. Steve Jones (he's an amazing guy and knows lots of cool stuff).

"For dyslexics, there is an unfathomable fit between how a word is written and how it sounds. English spelling (which makes dyslexics feel like ghoti out of ghoti, or fish out of water - the fish with 'gh' as in rough, 'o' as in women, 'ti' as in nation; and the water with the same letters but as in plough, cord and tin) makes no sense.

Italian is much more logical. The Dantean 'Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura...'both sounds and look better than 'In the midway of this our mortal life, I found myself in a gloomy wood...'

The forty distinct sounds in English can be spelled in over a thousand ways. Italian is more economical in its utterances, with just over twenty-five sounds and a mere thirty three ways to put them on paper. Italy has, a a result, only about half as many dyslexics per head as does England, and Italian children learn to read their logical language well before their anglophone cousins."

So there you go. If you're dyslexic, try Italian.

Comments

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

Interesting. All language teaching fails to take with me and i've slays wandered if that was connected to my bizarre brain plumbing.....

Thank you!! :D

[angryangeltoo.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much! It's so hard to explain to someone how I hear them speak, soft sounds are the worst, and Ch, Gh, Ouh, Puh, noises are a nightmare for me. German and Polish are the worst languages for me as I can not distinct the sounds comming from the language. :( I found Japanese easiest due to it's literal sounds, but I did struggle with the "ju" sound which thankfully is not used very often. The worst issue is that it leads to me mistranslating what I have heard and often funny but sometimes frustrating conversations that come from it.

[shellbun.livejournal.com]

That really is Quite Interesting :)

[hiddenpaw.livejournal.com]

On the other hand I may be dyslexic to the extent that I frequently defeat my spell checker, but I love using the spoken word in interesting and beautiful ways when I can. I'm quite sure writers of poetry, prose and song, not to forget our nation's great orritors would all miss those extra 15 sounds.