Dyslexia == Chinese?

[jason]

I just saw a very strange and problematic commercial on TV from an international dyslexia organization (http://www.interdys.org). The commercial, to me, implied that dyslexia was something related to christians who speak english. They went so far as to say something like isn't it frustrating when the words all look like chinese? It scares me when I see so little thought put into the presentation of ideas.

[update: the organization said that it wasn't their doing, and that they have not been advertising. strange, as I got the URL for their website from the commercial. still investigating.]

Comments

I would have liked to see the commercial!

[jenmccarthy.livejournal.com]

I don't know why people often say that. Though Chinese is another langauge and it does not use the same type of letters that we use I don't see why there would be any comparison. Why not just say that its like the words are scrambled or something like that. You should give them some ideas!

Re: I would have liked to see the commercial!

[(Anonymous)]

I found this as I wanted to know if there was any relation between languages that can't be pronounced character by character and dyslexia.
what do you think?
Like if you can't read absolutely in one direction. (you have to read the whole word before pronouncing it) Wouldn't this increase cases of dyslexia?

Re: I would have liked to see the commercial!

[complicittheory.livejournal.com]

It would be interesting if that was the case, but I personally don't see it. I have seen no research to that effect either.

" languages that can't be pronounced character by character and dyslexia" isn't what say chinese or japanese is like. There IS no character by character inherent in it, though people have invented phonetic (character by character) readings. The languages are pictographic. One thing I can say about pictographic languages is that you don't have the same problems with characters, lines or glyphs, inverting or moving around. When I write a chinese character I 'get it right' even when I can't write an English word.

But I'm sure they have other problems.