But you write and read fine apparently? I always thougth it was linked.

When I write I leave out a lot ‘the’ and ‘a’ and ‘an’. I have to edit what I write often (and I usually still don’t notice them missing).

I have trouble reading when I’m tired. Or fully awake making out handwriting.

I have many years of practice adding a’s, the’s, and you’s - people will ignore everything you write if you come across as mentally subpar.

Are audiobooks much easier for you than physical books? (I’m just comparing notes)

Audiobooks are easier! However, I don’t retain details or turns of phrase very well.

Physical books are slower but I can quote lines and remember more details. This might have to do with the longer consumption time…

1 week for physical or 3 days for an audiobook. More time mulling over the physical text = better memories maybe

I prefer audiobooks for difficult subjects, physical books for pleasure

Not trying to pry, but is english your second language?

I assume not, but I have the exact same thing with articles (“the” and “a”/“an”) that you have, except for me it was clearly caused by english being my second (my native language doesn’t have the concept of articles like that at all). And I got much better at it over time too, but it still slips through all the time for me. Less so in writing (even though it still happens not that rarely), but moreso in speech.

English is 1st. I learned other languages as an adult and have similar pronunciation issues and with hearing my own mistakes.

Wow, that’s interesting. Thanks for the response, I genuinely appreciate it!

Is English your native language?

Yes! Lovely language

> I still to this day, cannot hear what syllables are in words. ‘Cat’, 1? I hear 2.

> I cannot understand when I mispronounce words. I get corrected often and repeat back the correction but it sounds like what I said the first time.

Interestingly, both of these 'symptoms' are completely normal, for people learning a second language.

Especially from languages that don't have the same final and consonant cluster options that English does. For example Richard in Chinese is commonly transliterated as Lichade (lee-char-duh), even though it's only two syllables in English, and Charles is Cha'ersi (char-err-suur).

It's not necessarily the case that Chinese speakers hear the English word "Richard" as three syllables. They might or might not; either way, it isn't possible for them to produce it as two. (Or as three, as you illustrate, but there's a limit to how far you can go in the attempt to produce a foreign name accurately. A country can be named 圣文森特和格林纳丁斯, but that's just not going to work for a person whose name you need to pronounce more than once.)

Hearing problems and production problems are both common, and they overlap heavily, but they don't overlap perfectly.

Speaking of how people perceive foreign words, I'm still interested in the following:

1. Mandarin and Cantonese both use the sounds /s/ (just like English S) and /f/ (ditto, just like English F, though there are Chinese speakers who, like the Japanese, don't distinguish F and H).

2. Neither Mandarin nor Cantonese uses the sound /θ/ (beginning of the English words thorn, thunder, thwack, etc.).

3. Mandarin speakers perceive an English [θ] as being the sound /s/. It's not just that they hear it as something strange but get /s/ when they try to produce it - they cannot hear the difference between [θ] and [s]. I have a friend who learned to produce [θ] accurately, which didn't help much because her English experience is mainly auditory and she ends up using [θ] in words that use /s/.

4. Cantonese speakers are different; for them, an English [θ] is the sound /f/. This means that if a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker both listen to an English speaker pronounce "thin", neither will necessarily perceive anything particularly strange about the word, but they will disagree with each other's attempts to mimic it.

5. By now, there must be many people who are native speakers of both Cantonese and Mandarin.

6. What do they think when they hear [θ]? My best guess is that they can tell it's a strange sound, but I don't really know.

> Richard in Chinese is commonly transliterated as Lichade (lee-char-duh), even though it's only two syllables in English, and Charles is Cha'ersi (char-err-suur).

I should note that the Mandarin syllable cha is not at all rhotic; the transcription "char" only makes sense if your variety of English doesn't have rhotic vowels.

> I don’t enjoy the dreams anymore, I’m pretty bored of them now that I know what they probably do mechanically.

Why would you think that you know what the dreams are? Could you tell the rest of us please? Perhaps you are coming at this from a materialistic perspective?

I personally don't think there is anything straightforward about dreams. Whether you take a 'spiritual' approach (have you ever had a deja vu?) or a psychoanalytic view (messages from the subconscious, whatever that is) or some other perspective, there is nothing mechanistic or boring in dreams for me.

I would like to randomly chime in here regarding antidepressants and dreams.

On Prozac I sleep well but have 100% formulaic dreams. I don't like them. Each one is a mildly to moderately annoying situation that I cannot escape from.

For example, I'm in a building or neighborhood and I want to get away from some antagonist or who knows what. Using much effor and willpower I sort of get away but in that instant it resets and I'm back to getting away.

Citalopram (Celexa) though.....those dreams were the opposite. Wonderful and enjoyable with a bit of flying. Lucid too, I often realized I was in a dream and learned to manipulate it at will as well as some flying.

Just pitching in my 2 cents here, and not sure if it is what the parent commenter meant:

When I "realized" that dreams and dejavu's are all, litteraly just in your head, and just memories and visualizations that your brain is connecting together, I realized that reality is the same. You're just getting signals and processing them. Wether they come from outside ("real") or from within yourself, it doesn't really matter as long as you can tell the difference.

what I appreciated about the realization of dejavu and dreams being what they are, was that it gave me a much firmer grasp and believe that I can control my feelings and escape to a little fantasy where this worlds rules dont apply. And also accept that when you're just feeling shit, it's fine for a while, just some chemicals not playing ball.

You’re on the right track!

I can tell you but it’s a bit depressing. So turn back yea who are happy! Don’t read this. I thought it was something spiritual/mystical when I was younger and I liked that a lot more! And if you wanna keep enjoying dreams collapse my comment right now!!!

Here’s the boring nightmare: so… your mind is thinking what comes next? What comes next? And it’s corrected repeatedly by information from the eyes and ears. Maybe the nose. It constantly corrects and that’s your ‘experience’.

When you dream the system is still running; just no correction from the eyes

so you see a man in your dream and your brain goes -> what’s next? And it’ll take a guess. If good: nicer dream. If bad: bad(der) dream. Frankly, it’s usually something (seemingly) random which counts as neutral.

When wacky things happen your eye input isn’t correcting, so things get pretty wild or tame depending on how good your brains prediction is.

Your brain is going through scenarios with no correcting input.

Since I realized this 8-9 years ago I’ve been trying to prove this wrong to myself.

I wish it was spiritual or mystical but it’s pretty conclusively my deluded half asleep mind doing this. I have said goodbye to loved ones in dreams, a physically impossible scenario and it’s like your living it, just no reality correction from the eyes or ears.

Most people forget their dreams, but I get 4-6 a night EVERY damn night and they are like being awake!

ps. If anyone knows how to reduce dreaming please leave a comment! I don’t mind dreaming, but I envy falling asleep and waking up 7-8 hours in the future ready for the next day.

> ps. If anyone knows how to reduce dreaming please leave a comment! I don’t mind dreaming, but I envy falling asleep and waking up 7-8 hours in the future ready for the next day.

I had many more / worse dreams when on anti-insomnia drugs, so if you are taking those I would suggest trying to stop. Although, getting off anti-insomnia medication is a terrible, terrible experience for a couple weeks (and get medical advice etc of course).

Antidepressants certainly affect my dreams.

Prozac: Bad,annoying dreams but mildly so. Citalopram: Good dreams, sometimes epic dreams. Venlafaxine: Not sure I dream. Makes it harder to sleep too.

Does that mean you lucid dream since that realization? Or because you know that dreams are just an illusion you are bored?

I know dreams are just hallucinations but it doesn't make them any less interesting for me. I lucid dreams sometimes and I enjoy that state the most, so much that when it happens I keep waiting to go lucid every night for next few nights until I forget about it. Some lucid dreams are so cinematically beautiful I remember them for a very long time. Bad lucid dream helps waking up because I know it's a dream.

Very bored of them. Been lucid dreaming since 6-7. The novelty has worn off when you get so many chances

Thanks for your thoughts.

Have you considered lucid dreaming or astral projection? The idea that you step into your dream and control yourself; that you can direct yourself in your dream state to explore whatever-it-is. You can go to places of your choosing, as you are not bound by the body.

If you look into these experiences, you find many people who say they learnt about parts of material reality, that they are then able to verify materially.

These ideas are highly intriguing to me. As you are someone with such a capacity for dreaming, you could certainly try these ideas out (ie explore in dreams then verify in reality), if you haven't already. If you have tried, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the matter.

> If you look into these experiences, you find many people who say they learnt about parts of material reality, that they are then able to verify materially.

I can do this, too, but usually while I'm awake and bored. Reality is quite redundant, and we get all sorts of information from all sorts of sources, and sometimes I can put the puzzle pieces together and deduce things I "shouldn't" have known.

This power doesn't extend to localised information, such as the value of a hidden dice roll, and it's quite mundane. A generalisation of cold-reading. What Sherlock Holmes would call deduction, though it's actually abductive reasoning.

Examples: • Entering a building, imagining design constraints, deducing the presence of exactly one lift, inferring its location, inferring the existence of an extra wing behind the building (to place the lift in the middle), extrapolating observed foot traffic, and guessing which floor and corridor a particular office was. • Listening to someone explain geopolitics for half an hour, and inferring that they're a double-jointed insomniac.

Yeah I think a lot of it is having a strong imagination and going along with it for a bit.

> If you look into these experiences, you find many people who say they learnt about parts of material reality, that they are then able to verify materially.

The opposite is true: the CIA wasted lots of money on this, and they came up entirely empty handed, obviously. It is very very thoroughly debunked.

Lucid dreaming is fun and you should try it. It’s tough to get the hang of in the beginning but a very interesting experience. If you do it well it’s whatever you imagine: done poorly, you’ll get close… but your own expectations might hold you back. When you wake up you can reflect on those and plan how to do better with your more capable conscious mind.

I have not astral projected but I’ll look into it and if I remember I’ll message you after a few months

Sleep apnoea can cause a lot of dreams, as it causes you to be half awake. So definitely get yourself tested for that.

I can induce sleep paralysis by sleeping with a pillow over my head pretty consistently. I’ll get double checked. I thought apnea caused tiredness more often but I usually feel pretty good in the morning.

> Your brain is going through scenarios with no correcting input.

But this is pretty interesting as your subconscious is bubbling up into your ego!

Regular cannabis/THC use is pretty famous for reducing REM sleep and dreaming.

I don't consume often, haven't in years, but I remember having pretty wild dreams after, so I wouldn't get a good rest. So there is a difference with regular documentation?

> I cannot understand when I mispronounce words. I get corrected often and repeat back the correction but it sounds like what I said the first time.

I have the exact same problem.

I had troubles learning pronunciations when I was a kid, but I never had other learning problems.

As an adult, I struggled enough with pronunciation that I consulted two hearing specialists to determine if there were any issues with my ears. It turns out my hearing is fine.

Is it possible for someone to get a diagnosis for dyslexic based on pronunciation problems only?

I must say I am relieved to finally find someone who shares my experience.

You might be able to be diagnosed, but there’s no medication or cure. You can get extra time on tests if you’re younger.

You can Google dyslexic signs. I think last time I looked auditory processing anomalies and the retina or lens was oddly shaped in 95% of dyslexics. Dyslexic is also an umbrella term for a bunch of things so you’ll have to sort through to find your flavor.

Best fix is a good nights sleep. Also make sure you move closer to speech you want to comprehend and the people you interact with most enunciate and speak at a good volume (too many people speak poorly and could use 2 weeks of beginner theater classes)

Thank you for the kind, detailed reply. I wish I had known my condition may be dyslexic when I was younger. Taking a beginner theater class is now on my todo list.

> I still to this day, cannot hear what syllables are in words. ‘Cat’, 1? I hear 2.

What syllables do you hear? (I'm assuming you have English as a mother tongue?)

His mind emphasises the consonants instead of the vowels.

That is such a helpful insight.

I'm always on the lookout for new ways to think about how we process the world, just curious if you're aware of this distinction appearing in something like poetry / music?

that’s right! I hear Cah and a T sound. I never realized it was consonant I was hearing. ‘Button’ has 4? I could have divided all my answers by 2 and passed those quizzes when I was younger…

this is makking me think more about japanese where every consonant is paired with a vowel.

makes me wonder how much of what we call developmental issues are culturally dependant to manifest

My experience is that English speakers are terrible at knowing how many syllables there are in a word. I think it has a lot to do with how our vowels are. Some vowels like /i/ tend to get their own syllable in places where most languages would blend it into an adjacent vowel and maybe make it into /j/. Other times what we think of as a single vowel is actually 2-3 vowels.

I’ve always wondered about how language is taught.

Kids are taught that “cat” phonetically is “c-a-t”. Almost sounds like three syllables at that point. Do that with other words and one will quickly question how many syllables are in everything!!

I’m not dyslexic but I feel like the way we teach language is broken.

I'm like this too and I've found I thrive with autonomy and burn out in rigid environments.