Dyslexia - Flashbacks and Epiphanies

It was walking round the supermarket that did it, a week after I had been told that I was dyslexic.  There I was pushing my trolley, looking at the shopping list I had been gathering on my mobile phone and pondering whether I should try to use Buzan’s ‘Use your Memory’ or mentally mind map my shopping needs, when it happened.  It?  What was it?  It was the possible reason I was so bad at French at school.  I had always assumed that I was just wasn’t good cut out for foreign languages until I spent a couple of months in Russia in 1992.  It was an interesting place, Yeltsin had just come to power and Moscow had plenty of demos.  I couldn’t speak Russian before I went and, like a typical Brit, sought out any English speaker that I could.  But I quickly realized that I could think of words and phrases very quickly and my pronunciation wasn’t that bad.  I liked the sound of the language and the words seemed easier on the ears and the brain.

 

School French

So there you have it, and I was walking round the supermarket.  Bang!  School French, taught from day one from the basis of written grammar –this is the last thing a dyslexic needs.  Secondly, definite articles; ‘la chat’, ‘la maison’, ‘le’, ‘la’, ‘ill’, ‘ille’ etc.  You get the picture or actually you don’t.  Davis (see review) draws attention to the fact that it dyslexics struggle over what he calls ‘trigger’ words, words that do not easily conjure pictures.  How do you picture an ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘did’, ‘do’.  La maison?  We struggle over that with words in English mate!  But in Russian; ‘dom’ (house) ‘koshka’ (cat); see no definite or indefinite article to get stressed about.  Russian has an easier access point for a dyslexic.

 

Okay I’ve also heard it spoken a lot, but there again I had a lot of English spoken before I learnt to write it.  I want to talk about learning a second language another time.  For now it will serve as an example.

 

This man was everywhere in Russia and
 still stretches a long shadow of the past.

Naive or normal?

For the past month I have been having a continual stream of flashbacks and epiphanies.  Winceful memories of school French giving a clue as to how my brain might work.  It’s as if my head is working backwards and re-evaluating experiences that I can come to terms with an opening of possibilities as to what I might do.  Is a this naive or normal?