Learn to read a binary font by reading a story • Hacker News Board

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#41

Post by devrim » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:28 AM UTC

Cushman wrote: post #31

trogdoro wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sort of makes the words become symbols.

Bit of a false dichotomy there-- you already read words as individual symbols; otherwise spellchecking wouldn't be a thing. They're just a little wider than these.

sorry i started it.. i meant perceiving a word as one symbol vs a combination of letters. that will speed up and increase the amount of information we can take in, drastically.

considering we do use few thousand words max, to do 99% of our communication (sorry forgot where i read this article), learn those symbols, your eyes now can see much more at once, and brain can digest accordingly.

this is a serious upgrade folks, not just saying, i've been reading dotsies for a while now, i'm dead serious, this could become what my children will read and write with..

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#42

Post by houshuang » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:31 AM UTC

trogdoro wrote: post #23

gcanyon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just tired, but both of these were near-uninteligable to me even at the beginning. It could also be simply that I'm a bit compulsive about reading -- I find it impossible to gloss over even a single word that I can't puzzle out, so even the first lines stop me in my tracks even though I can read all the words but one or two. In any case, if you have the inclination, a version that started even more gently m…

> if you have the inclination, a version that started even more gently might work better for me. How's this? http://dotsies.org/stories/the-runaway-couple-2.html

I spent quite a bit of time on the first link, but I also quite like this one. I think to me a lot of the value is just gradually introducing a few characters at a time - not really sure about how much my brain is picking up the shapes of the letters subconsciously. Would be interesting to do an experiment.

I would actually prefer that the hints stayed for all the letters, even without a grey line or whatever. I used it very rarely (and have enough self-discipline not to overuse it) but once in a while when I've forgotten a letter, or are not sure, it's a pain to look it up because the hint has disappeared.

It would be fun to experiment with putting this font on my Kindle btw.

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#43

Post by btipling » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:34 AM UTC

I couldn't read anything past the title.

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#44

Post by myf » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:36 AM UTC

the density reminds me of chinese

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#45

Post by trogdoro » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:39 AM UTC

trothamel wrote: post #36

trogdoro wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly for space-efficiency. See http://dotsies.org for a better description.

Dotsies aren't all that space-efficient, though, when compared to regular old text. For example, in this comparison: http://i.imgur.com/Ldd70.png I'd argue that the text on the right, in the green font, is just as readable as the dotsies, while taking up less space.

That's probably largely because the circuits in your brain have become finely honed on latin characters, after reading letters many millions of times for many years.

It's difficult to know how that image would appear to someone who was equally acclimated to both. At the moment no such person exists.

One clue might be how they compare to each other after you scoot your chair back from your computer until both have become blurry. When you get far enough away that you can't distinguish anything in the green paragraph, can you see any distinguishing characteristics in the red one? You won't be able to make them out, of course, but can you see that there are light and dark areas?

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#46

Post by channi » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:40 AM UTC

It is fuckin' cool, I really liked that.

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#47

Post by trogdoro » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:47 AM UTC

Cushman wrote: post #33

This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly. (And since what you're really asking is not for people to learn a new alphabet, but to learn a new symbol for every word in their lexicon, it wouldn't be that much more of a leap. Think about it.) Thinking about it--…

> You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?).

Sounds a bit like omniglot.com/writing/franklin.htm. Franklin scrapped c, j, q, w, x, and y.

The idea sounds reasonable to me. He gave up on it after a while though. I'm guessing the more differences you have, the bigger the barrier to adoption tends to be.

> just press every sound that's in the word

Sounds reminiscent of omniglot.com/writing/shorthand.htm.

> Chording becomes your standard input device

Check out http://dotsies.org/typing.html.

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#48

Post by david_ar » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:48 AM UTC

I really like this approach (even if I'm still not entirely convinced about the benefits of dotsies).

For a while, I've had this idea of a book that starts in standard English, and gradually alters the grammar and introduces new words - so that halfway-through it's written in somewhat of a pidgin/creole language, and by the end you're reading a completely different language (e.g. French or Japanese). I'm not aware of such a thing existing, or even being feasible for that matter, but I think it would be interesting.

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#49

Post by Cushman » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 4:55 AM UTC

devrim wrote: post #41

Cushman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit of a false dichotomy there-- you already read words as individual symbols; otherwise spellchecking wouldn't be a thing. They're just a little wider than these.

sorry i started it.. i meant perceiving a word as one symbol vs a combination of letters. that will speed up and increase the amount of information we can take in, drastically. considering we do use few thousand words max, to do 99% of our communication (sorry forgot where i read this article), learn those symbols, your eyes now can see much more at once, and brain can digest accordingly. this is a serious upgrade fo…

That's what I'm saying, you already do that. When you read a line of text your eyes move several words at a time, but your area of focus is only wide enough to really see a few letters at a time. You are recognizing some words wholesale, simply ignoring others and filling in with context.

The impression that you have seen the entire line of text is a clever illusion developed inside your brain. You very rarely pay attention to individual letters as graphemes symbolizing individual phonemes; you simply can't think that fast (and in fact, you probably do not have a very good conscious idea of which letters symbolize which sounds in reality).

Not to say that dotsies aren't neat, and they could have some benfit to reading speed, but really all they are is thinner. Reading is already a pretty amazing superpower that you have.

Now if you're serious about wanting your kids to read better than you, check out what I wrote about a phonetic alphabet above. That would be a serious improvement.

Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

#50

Post by Cushman » Sat, Mar 31, 2012, 5:07 AM UTC

trogdoro wrote: post #47

Cushman wrote: post #33

This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly. (And since what you're really asking is not for people to learn a new alphabet, but to learn a new symbol for every word in their lexicon, it wouldn't be that much more of a leap. Think about it.) Thinking about it--…

> You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?). Sounds a bit like omniglot.com/writing/franklin.htm. Franklin scrapped c, j, q, w, x, and y. The idea sounds reasonable to me. He gave up on it after a while though. I'm guessing the more differences you have, the bigger the barrier to adoption tends to be. > just press every sound that's in the wor…

Yeah, it's been proposed before... It's pretty hard to convince everyone they should start using a new language nobody else can read. (More people now speak Klingon than Esperanto. Ouch.)

I think computers change the equation, though. Machine translation would be almost impeccable. Using phonetics visually would make chording intuitive in a way it hasn't been until now... You can do a soft launch where you start out teaching people to type phonetically, but showing them alphabetic English. Gradually work into the idea that the buttons you press could be their own writing system. And the benefits would greatly reward anyone who decided to work in the system.

> Check out http://dotsies.org/typing.html.

I hate to say it, but that's kinda the opposite of a chording keyboard. The idea with chording is you press symbols simultaneously to write an entire word with a single keystroke (this is how stenographers are able to type >300wpm). That looks like using multiple keys to type a single character, which is an interesting hack, but ergonomically a step back from a conventional keyboard, yeah?