Cool article! The original is actually from a year and a half ago (https://www.mpg.de/11312776/lesenlernen-veraenderung-gehirn-erwachsene https://www.mpg.de/113

Cool article! The original is actually from a year and a half ago (https://www.mpg.de/11312776/lesenlernen-veraenderung-gehirn-erwachsene https://www.mpg.de/11312776/lesenlernen-veraenderung-gehirn-...), curious why they published it only now in English. One quote bothered me, however: "Hindi, one of the official languages of India, is based on Devanagari, a scripture with complex characters describing whole syllables or words rather than single letters." This isn't entirely correct. Devanagari: - isn't complex. there are only 46 characters, whose strokes aren't meaningfully harder than Latin ones to write, unlike, say, Chinese where strokes can be intricate. They're typically one or two-stroke characters. - 1:1 unambiguously maps writings to sounds, unlike English. yes, it does map to syllables. it's immediately obvious how to pronounce a word when reading it. I can't imagine them having to learn a language like English, where you have to rote memorize exceptions all the time. - doesn't have characters that describe whole words...not sure where they got this idea. There are really short words that can be said with one syllable, but that's coincidence, like in English "a" is both a character and a word, though I wouldn't claim that letters map to words because of it.