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People everywhere read words in a very similar way regardless if it is made from pictures, such as pictographs (Chinese characters), or words made from letters.
This knowledge gives us insight into how writing developed and how we read as well as how we can delve deeper into creativity and communication.
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Some of the earliest writing is from 3000B.C. Mesopotamia. They recorded entries on tablets about the quantities of goods in some kind of bookkeeping.
They wrote down in order to keep account of who delivered what when. But this system was still far away from expressing ideas and writing great works of literature.
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Japanese children learn two writing systems: The kanji system is based on Chinese characters, and the kana system is purely phonetic.
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Different areas of the brain are active when we read. We extract visual information that is correlated with sound to get meaning.
Reading does not just involve learning the letters. You have to understand and recognize the words, too. Skilled readers learn to recognize the whole word as a unit and connect it directly to meaning.
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Research points to speed reading being a form of skimming, which is appropriate for short text but not for longer ones.
For long texts, reading more
Although there is an academic consensus that speed-reading decreases comprehension,
On the other hand, the same can’t be said for comprehension measurement techniques, as we can process text differently according to context.
"I took a course in speed-reading...and was able to read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It's about Russia."
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Old school printed books and e-books sales remain flat in the last five years, while Audiobook sales have shown an increase.
Such figures show that people are shifting towards audio formats o...
Audiobooks allow the listeners to get the meaning without the use of their eyes, which books require.
Reading as a skill is 'skipped' while listening to audiobooks, though it is ideal for people with dyslexia, those who cannot 'decode' the written word.
The reading act, which requires focus, and which makes us stop, think and re-read is somehow only confined to books, as a study proves that retention is higher with books than with podcasts.
The audio format also misses some key visual aspects of fonts paragraphs and headings, that are available in books.
Uruk was the world’s first large city and completely changed humanity’s ability to store, exchange and replicate information by creating the first writing system in 3200 BCE.
...In the late 4th millennium BCE, Uruk had 10000 inhabitants which increased to 50000 in the decades after that, making it the largest city in Mesopotamia, and in the Sumerian civilization.
The people of Uruk were highly civilized and worked in various professions like ambassadors, priests, stonecutters, cooks, and jewellers.
Uruk was the first civilization to introduce written record-keeping, using symbols, pictographs, and eventually words. The Sumerians were an innovative civilization and improvised this symbolic language into complex documents, epic poems and literature, along with lists and genealogies.
Writings were mostly on reeds and clay, slowly forming a complex language of letters based on ‘wedge-shaped’ markings, known as cuneiform.