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"Seeing" the words when you speak? | ||
Tags: Synesthesia | Brain | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Olympia Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5973 days ago 195 posts - 244 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Old English, French | Message 17 of 38 06 August 2008 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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I definitely see things when I speak Spanish. I haven't been formally diagnosed with synesthesia (I don't know how
that can be diagnosed), but I was diagnosed a year ago with Asperger's Syndrome, and I mentioned to the doctor about seeing colors and images that connect with certain things (7s are orange and 9s are purple), and she told me about synesthesia. I don't think mine is as strong as some other people's, but I've always been this way and until a year ago I thought it was completely normal and happened to everyone. It can be slightly different when I speak Spanish because it's almost like the words are being fed to me through a news ticker...odd, I know :). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6349 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 18 of 38 22 February 2010 at 5:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I always see the words written when I speak, but they have no color - just plain black in some normal font.
Because of that, it was easy for me to spell French words in school. However, now when I'm learning Japanese, I really have to struggle to get my inner vision to print the words in kana/kanji. My brain automatically creates strings of roman letters as soon as I hear the sounds (and I've never relied on romaji except when I learned the kana a few years ago). This is an intereting thread. Does anyone have any ideas how this trait can be used in order to learn vocab etc? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Johntm Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5414 days ago 616 posts - 725 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 19 of 38 23 February 2010 at 5:28am | IP Logged | ||
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I have heard of people subconciously assigning colors to numgers, but I don't do that or what the OP describes. I don't see the words in my mind, although I do hear them.
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| Katie Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6710 days ago 495 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, Hungarian Studies: French, German | Message 20 of 38 23 February 2010 at 6:05am | IP Logged | ||
Same here. And it doesn't just go for foreign words - I see the same for English words, mathematical equations etc. I can almost write them 'in the air' and see them in front of me. I don't know if someone was already trying to say this, but quite often I can look at a sentence as a whole, and without 'reading' it, I already know what it says.... if that makes sense at all. I do the same for single words aswell. Hey, maybe we all have something like this in common and that's why we're drawn to foreign languages and linguistics?? I don't see colours for words or letters when I look at them, but I definitely see colours for emotions. I can tell how upset I am by the 'colour' of the emotion, by how intense or light it is, etc. I know when I really need to draw a line and take a break because the colours will become more intense. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cherepaha Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6581 days ago 126 posts - 175 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Spanish, Polish, Latin, French | Message 21 of 38 23 February 2010 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | ||
All this is very interesting! I remember as a child hearing my grandmother matter-of-factly saying that a certain name or a letter were "green" or "blue" and making a conscious effort to see that. I couldn’t :). My Russian language teacher in the elementary and middle school used to have "train your visual memory" exercises, where she’d show us a poem for a very brief moment written on a black board, and we were required to take it in with all the punctuation signs, and to then reproduce it, once she had drawn a curtain over it. Some kids did it easily, and I remember being overwhelmed by it, until I figured out that all I needed to do was read it out loud (well, whisper, really) with punctuation signs to myself. Then there was no effort to remember. My dad would frequently suggest that when one is not sure about how to spell a word, one should just write it and will right away "see" if that is correct or not. Once again, as much as I tried, I could not "see" anything. If I ever said out loud how to spell it, though, I would never forget. My first boss used to get taken aback by the fact that I used to act as a peculiar version of a human voice recorder, since I remembered his conversations with clients verbatim and always knew what he’d promised in which exact conversation, and how he’d modified that in later discussions (version control ;)). I can also say where I'd heard any given word for the first time in my life – I remember it in the voice of a person who said it for years, it just never goes away. It seems that I grew up in a family of people who "saw" the language, much like many members of the forum who posted in this thread, while there is possibly a significant number of people who "hear" it instead. Does anyone know if those abilities can coexist in a highly developed form in one individual? Or does one way of remembering/learning always dominate? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6042 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 22 of 38 23 February 2010 at 2:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Update, I now see characters in my mind! They gradually changed from pinyin to characters as I learned them. Sometimes it is a mix, and they are colored depending on the tone and vowel sound.
Weird! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5439 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 24 of 38 24 February 2010 at 12:21am | IP Logged | ||
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Like Tombstone, I see words and quotes where I read them. In particular, I remember where on the page things were. Usually, the page is too fuzzy for me to read, but once I've concentrated on "where" I encountered the word or thought, I can remember what I was thinking at the time and it comes back to me. And if the book is handy, I can find what I was looking for in one or two minutes since I just have flip through, say, the middle thirty pages while looking at the bottom left hand corner on the right hand pages. But I suppose this is a bit far afield of synesthesia.
On the synesthesia question, this thread raises the question: What if you don't have synesthesia but would like to apply some of the techniques available to people who do? These two sites have information on how to develop or deliberately experience the phenomenon if it doesn't happen to you automatically: http://superconscious1.blogspot.com/2008/01/developing-synes thesia.html http://blog.madcaplogic.com/?p=583 1 person has voted this message useful |
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