[James_K]

I can't help but feel these languages are just silly, or at least very badly designed. Maybe in the future, when AI is good enough to translate everything in real time, we will just find a language that is best and teach children that instead. It would save a lot of headaches, and probably also cure dyslexia.

[Tor3]

To call a language silly is.. silly. I don't know Chinese. But for a person like me, Japanese is incredible. It's so extremely logical. Exceptions are almost non-existing. Sentences are modular. Etc. I love it, as a person with a programmer's mind. It has very few phonemes and that's one reason it's hard to "fix" the writing system, but that's also one of its good points, for someone learning the language.

As for "translate in real time", that won't happen because from Japanese to English it would mean to translate before the sentence is done, knowing the intention of the speaker before the speaker says anything. For the simple reason that in Japanese the verb comes at the end while in languages like English it's typically the second word. Using an AI wouldn't be any better than when I used to translate for my wife and the other way around. It works but is hardly satisfactory for anything more than occasionally (speak, wait to hear the translation, speak back, ditto).

A Star Trek universal transparent real-time translator will not happen.

As for dyslexia.. I don't see the connection. Dyslexia is a problem of reading and writing, and it exists independent of the language, and also the writing system (it has been sometimes claimed that Japanese children are less affected by dyslexia than people learning Latin-based languages, and I for some time kind of thought so too.. but I have since seen multiple cases of dyslexia related to Japanese as well, it's the exact same problem)

[James_K]

> it exists independent of the language

Rates of dyslexia are much higher in countries with less phonetic spelling systems. The general conclusion from this is that, while dyslexia may exist at equal rates in countries with phonetic spelling, its effects are diminished to the point where many individuals with it can read unimpaird.

> A Star Trek universal transparent real-time translator will not happen.

I never claimed it would. A delay of a few seconds between speech and translation is acceptable, much the same way actual translators do it.

[Tor3]

I would like to see actual research into dyslexia vs spelling systems, because I've tried to find it and I haven't been able to. Instead I see only claims as the above, which, so far, appear to be based on "common sense", which doesn't actually work here. Common sense says that languages with complicated spelling rules (English, French) should affect dyslectics more than straight-forward languages like Italian and Finnish, but it doesn't, to any noticeable effect.

As an individual I only have anecdotal "evidence", but for what it's worth - I already mentioned that I've seen dyslexia in Japanese children, but not only that - I've also seen that dyslectic bi-lingual children have dyslexia both in Japanese and in their European language.

Unless I see real evidence I'll continue to assume that dyslexia is simply under-reported in e.g. Japan. As has been the case for so many other things - nobody speaks of lactose intolerance in Japan, though it obviously exists.

[James_K]

Yes I was interested in this myself so, before posting what I just wrote, I looked into it and went through the sources on a few papers. I ended up at this fairly authoritative-sounding book which made the claim, though I don't remember the source they cited and I can't be bothered to find it again. The claim made was not that dyslexia wasn't present in other languages, but that its effects were reduced in phonetic ones. The same way that someone in a wheelchair still has broken legs, but can benefit greatly from the installation of ramps.