Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Fun with Polls ?nca uoy raed tihs

I was sent this in a email you may have seen it.

fi yuo cna


raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too

Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny
55 out of 100 cna

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod
aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht
I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the
hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch
at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it
dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod
are, the olny
iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit

pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit
a pboerlm.
Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter
by istlef, but the
wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas
tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

I could read it, but context helped a lot - it's very easy to predict words when one knows the context. And it was harder/slower than normal. So yes, spelling still *is* important.

Plus, this doesn't work for lots of closely spelled words - where rearranging the order changes the word. Then, only context will tell you what it is.

Bethy

I cuold raed ti oot lol!!

I could read it, too.

In fact, I could read it so effortlessly, I was very surprised by the 55 out of 100 statistic.

I suspect the author is telling porkies. I can't imagine that many people will have difficulty reading this. It's more like a party trick, than an actual scientific example, imo.

LabRat

People who know how to read--that is, people who use small phonetic samplings to predict the author's meaning--have no trouble reading it because the context enables us to predict what the next word should be.

However, many people who presumably "can read" are unable to figure it out because they don't actually read. They identify individual words without context over and over until they finally remember enough of the words in a row to figure out what is being said. For those people, the example above is impossible to read. It's nothing more than a very long "jumble," the puzzle that got pulled for Arianna Carlin's column. An astonishing number of people have this kind of reading problem. They're the ones who can read a passage out loud quite well but have no idea what it said when they're done. In order to understand any written material, they have to read it repeatedly.

I've just spent the past semester training to teach those students how to read. The results are staggering, but the process uses a different model for reading: not teaching word identification but predictive strategies instead.

I recieved that message in spanish also, I could read it as easily as this one.

I agree, if you know the context it helps a lot.

I've noticed that sometimes I had that problem at school, especially while reading in english or italian, not being any of those languages my mother tongue. I knew what the text I read outloud was about but didn't quite understand it deeply, for details I had to re-read it.

I always thought it was because I was more focused in pronouncing well the words.

Carolyn

This story is actually an urban myth - even though most people can manage to work out the words, misspelled though they are. This version has a 'misspelled' word from the original: if the first and last letters are supposed to be in the correct order, why is 'can' spelt 'cna'?

See the Snopes story

here .

I noticed another misspelling, too: "a rscheearch" implies "a researcher," since "research" isn't a countable noun--at least, not in the US. Researcher should have 3 "r"s, not 2 "ch"s..

I saw that too, Sheila (and it's in the original email as cited on Snopes, as opposed to the cna/can I pointed to). To me, 'a research' screams ESL-speaker, as in my experience - and I work with ESL speakers all the time nowadays - many ESL speakers tend to believe that 'research' can be treated as a countable noun. I've seen 'a research' and also 'researches'.

English is indeed a very difficult language to learn as an adult.


Wendy

Well, I have different reading modes. One mode where I read over all mistakes (which I have to turn on consciously). This also includes bad grammar which is why I didn't mind 'a research' in this special case.

In one of my other modes - which I'm constantly in - I notice almost all mistakes, ranging from spelling over grammar to lexical mistakes and so forth. Comes in pretty handy when doing a beta.

I was able to breeze right through it as well. That was very interesting!

82.735% of the statistics you see on line are invented.

Tee-hee!

Somewhat related - I have read guidebooks, etc., about Chinese tourist attractions where the text was obviously translated from Chinese to English. I've seen some very strange constructions and mis-use of verbs, along with every other grammatical error one could make. I wonder if it is because European languages tend to have a similar structure, but Chinese, being logographic, has a totally different underpinning?

So that would make this the third kind of lie, right?

I've once seen this signature in a forum: