Grasping for Words

A couple of people have asked me what it’s like to learn Braille. And while I’m not exactly reading like a seasoned pro, I did want to share some observations.

Learning Braille is not like learning another language, as a few people have hypothesized to me. At least, I don’t see much similarity. The intake mechanism is completely different from how one would learn any other language, in that it is purely tactile and doesn’t rely at all on sight or sound, the two usual vectors for learning a new language.

Reading purely through touch can, for a novice like me, result in some hilarious moments. About a week ago, I spent a good two minutes puzzling over the word “c-o-u-l-d.” “Is this a typo? Is it some British spelling of ‘cold?,’” I thought, at least half-seriously. I had to sit there and beat my head against it for an eternity before realizing what the word could be. These are the growing pains of developing a new way to metabolize language, to borrow my pal Yale’s wonderful phrase.

In spite of the occasional struggles, though, I’m pleased to report that I can already sense major progress in my brain’s capacity to recognize Braille letters. When I first began, I had to basically cross-reference each letter against what I had learned. For every letter I would encounter (with the exception of ‘A,’ which is just one dot), I would need to pause momentarily and think, “OK, I feel dots 1, 4, and 5 – that’s a…D.” Now, my brain mostly bypasses the cross-reference phase and recognizes D on its own terms.

So, in the past three weeks – or more accurately, in about twelve days, since we’ve had some other activities eat into Braille class time here and there – I’ve basically finished Grade 1 Braille. I now know the alphabet and the ten or so most common punctuation marks. I’m reading sentences and getting used to reading two lines not separated by a line break (at first, I was reading only single lines).

Two major challenges await in the next couple months. To begin with, I will soon begin reading pages with no breaks between lines except for paragraphs. Reading four or five lines of Braille all stacked on top of each other is very challenging, because it’s easy to lose your place and to mistake the top or bottom of an adjacent line for part of the line you’re trying to read.

More than that, though, Braille is all about efficiency, and so the main thing I must tackle next is contractions. Since letters are, by necessity, a little bigger in Braille than they are in print, it is necessary to eliminate space wherever possible so that not every book in Braille ends up the size of a phone book. Braille relies on contractions for common word pairs, so things like ‘gh’ or ‘en’ have their own distinct characters. So that’s what I’ll be working on starting next week.

I have to say – I’ve enjoyed learning Braille a lot more than I thought I would. The realist in me had the notion that it would be mostly pointless to learn a language that has largely been obviated by the rise of screen readers and other new technologies. But there’s something kind of thrilling about learning a new way to read, and taking in information through a different medium. It has been slow going, at least in the sense that I am acutely aware I’m learning a new way to perform a skill I already have, and starting from scratch to do so. But it’s been very enjoyable nonetheless. I doubt I’ll ever get to the point where I read Braille as masterfully as someone who has practiced their entire life – there’s a guy in my program who reads at about 250 words per minute, which is faster than the average sighted reader’s 200 words a minute – but I do hope to keep up with it after completing this program.