Anon is Illiterate

I read a lot of science fiction, and a younger friends at work frequently asked me for recommendations, and he liked talking about the books after reading them. At some point I found out that he exclusively consumes them as audiobooks, which is fine and I didn't think much about it. Some years down the line, when I was getting ready to retire, I had to pass on things to him. There was enough of it that, in addition to working elbow-to-elbow with him, I documented all the details in some long emails. When we meet, I'd say "The details are in the email," and focus on explaining the big picture.

It became obvious that he never read the emails. When I talked to him about it, he admitted that he really struggles with any long block of text. The guy is really smart, and he knows a lot about a lot of things, but he gets all his info from audio and video because struggles to consume text. There's clearly some kind of learning/mental issue going on there. It's going to make the job tough for him, but I hope he works it out.

That is so crazy for me on a personal level because I'm the exact opposite. My brain has a really hard time processing auditory instructions.
- Seriously, written guide > > > > > > > video guide
- I'm good with distilling information in whatever form, but I do get impatient with audio/video sometimes. I can read faster than people talk, so I want the audio to go faster. I've tried upping the playback speed, but we encode a lot of information in the pauses and cadence of speech, and the faster playback screws with the perception of that. Doing that is fine for technical information, but I don't care for it with a novel.
- This is also a great example of how, even if there are no disabilities involved, everyone has different learning styles. Some people just process information differently.
If only everyone recorded personal logs like in Star Trek you could have just bequeathed him those! On a serious note though, good on them for trying to learn and expand their knowledge even with some sort of learning disability. I was diagnosed with ADHD like 30 years ago and I understand how troubling it can be trying to read things while constantly having to re-read sentences because you spaced out, or having to keep 5 browser tabs open because each new section brings up some other topic that I now need. I describe my learning/throught process as a spider web for good reason.
- I actually prefer text for the same reason. No need to pause and rewind, then once again forget what I wanted to hear and go back for the 4th time.
  I by far prefer text for things that matter.
- Life is hard enough without those extra challenges. Hang in there.
They found a way to learn that works for them. As someone that almost always prefer text, I understand why you feel this way but you must have realized that most people prefer this format. And as far as I can tell, so long as they can read an email when it's important (which they'll learn one way or another), it will be fine.
- He's been working at the company for more than 15 years and still struggles to read any significant block of text, so I'm worried for him. It's not that he prefers audio, it's that text is a real problem for him.
  And don't misunderstand me: I'm the guy's biggest cheerleader; I very much want him to succeed and am happy with any viable workaround he finds. I'm not pushing any sort of personal bias on him. The company works with a lot of text.
- so long as they can read an email when it’s important
  At my last job I managed a team of coders in India. They absolutely, categorically refused to ever read anything that I wrote to them, no matter what the situation. I had to maintain a 4AM-noon schedule just so I could have realtime interactions with them at least part of my day and give them instructions verbally. To their credit, they didn't really listen to what I said much, either.
  I still wonder whether it was a side effect of being able to speak English but not being able to read and write it very well, or whether they were consciously trying to avoid having any paper trail that they could be held accountable for.
Something else I forgot to mention was a concept that I learned in the military called BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. The idea is that most people aren't going to read past the first sentence or two before skipping to the end so you better get the absolutely critical information out right away; before your reader gets bored/decides they have more pressing matters to deal with. I would regularly see emails that started with a summary before even the salutations.
- I just saw this at work today for the first time from a younger person. No one I've ever emailed with has done summaries before. It took me by surprise... especially because this is an organization that is built on reading things.
- Oh, yes, we use BLUF at work a lot, but it's not really useful if you're trying to pass along detailed knowledge.
Google Gemini will turn a block of text into a podcast convo to help people with this particular quirk. Have him try it out
- Audio input of information is many factors slower than reading can be. Better to try and fix a reading problem.
- The text in question would be behind a firewall, but I believe there's a corporate LLM now. I'll suggest it.

I've known several men that were proud that they didn't read books. (Not that they read manga or anything, either.)

One of them, in particuular, was a grown up version of a stereotypical highschool bully. Willfully ignorant doesn't begin to describe him. I ever meet him in a dark alley, I'd fucking gut him.

Anyhow, this behaviour (pride in ignorance) among women is rare enough that I've never seen it. When I was doing online dating, I had great success asking what they're reading and using decent grammar and vocabulary.

Anti-intellectualism and willfull ignorance have a lot to do with the situation here in the US. I think it's mostly a male problem as well.

Have you ever done any sort of IT support? I was internal IT in my first job and we had those people. It was mostly women 50+ years old who were proud that they know nothing about computers and would actively avoid listening when I tried to tell them how to do something trivial. Even when it was part of their jobs to do it. Then they would ask for help with the same stupid shit a few weeks later.
- Fucking hell, so much this. They're so goddamn proud of their ignorance. This is why I enforce a very strict "we're mechanics, not chauffeurs" policy in my team. We've got no duty - either literal or moral - to make up for incompetence.
- Not IT support directly but I've had that same experience with plenty of boomer men in machine shops. They're fucking proud that they suck at computer yet CNC has been around since the '80s in a big way.
  Ran a shop for a while and still have the terminating document from when I fired one of those fuckers.
- If I was as bad at reading and responding to emails as the folks I support...
Highschool bullies are just a grown up version of middle school bullies. That shit was supposed to stop there.
- And many of them never grow out of it and become President.
I met a lot of women like this also. It just manifests differently. Rather than books it will be the newest celebrity drama/reality show.

wtf is a "chapter book"?

It's a book with chapters. Basically a regular ass book. When kids are real little, their books are like 15 pages long. Then in like 1st or 2nd grade, they move onto reading big kid books - aka "chapter books" that have enough pages to warrant chapters.
You never hear someone over the age of 7 or 8 mention reading "chapter books" because they're just know as books.
Except anon, who is dumb as fuck.
- Anon could be a kid. On the internet nobody knows you're a dog. Actually, a lot of content on 4chan looks like a giggling 8 year old posted it; especially the posts about poop.
- There are regular books that don't have any chapters. Most of Terry Pratchett's Discworld Books are an example of this.
A book.
- With multiple chapters.
Literally just a book that isn't made for children.
it is a book which is long enough that its broken into "chapters" so that you have a good stopping point to pause your reading for the day.
Or in the context of OOP, a book containing many¹ pages of text and no pictures²
greater than 30
more than 0.5 pages of text per image
It's like a webnovel but not necessarily web.

Do note: The US public education system has raised a significant number of younger millennials, genZ, and gen-α (especially in impoverished areas) to be functionally illiterate due to both profiteering and desire to destroy education. Effectively, they switched to literacy programs meant to help people with cognitive disabilities somewhat function in a world that has writing everywhere. This does not teach people how to read or comprehend. It also robs them of capacity to self-learn from texts.

So, there's a massive cohort of people whose parents and/or caregivers were not able to be spend time teaching this extremely important skill who are likely below 6th grade reading level.

I heard schools have largely moved away from Phonics, which is wild to me. That's basically how reading was taught going back to at least medieval monks.
I hear they're using a "look and see" method or something? Word is that its how the Chinese teach their students to read....but they don't have an alphabet, so I don't know how that's supposed to work in English.
I have a relative who just retired from teaching and she says its a real mess in early education because of how badly this reading teaching method works, and its only worsening as students mature.
- The Chinese do have a Roman alphabet called pinyin for educational purposes. It's very consistent phonetically.
- Eng Learning TLDR: I was raised with both sight words and phonetics, and realize that my gen was fucked over.
  I've heard about the reading wars, but this was the first time I actually thought about it with my education, and I realize why I probably wouldn't read as well if I didn't have parents who actively read with me as a child.
  I'm a 2006 baby, so I guess my elementary years were at the perfect time for this little debate to occur. I definitely remember doing sight words and their flashcards, but I swear we still did phonetics (thank god). But like, how would anyone expect a kid to magically learn words by just looking at it 50 times and hearing a teacher say that word? I get that according to this article, a large portion of Eng words can't be read properly first try, but still, I see the value in having a kid connect the sounds of "cat, bat, hat, that," etc. Yes, some homonyms like "to, too, two" are gonna have to be "sight words" but that's unavoidable.
  I hated Eng class, not because of sucking at it, but how we never really got free reading time after elementary, and that we were doing lame ass journals and reports on books I didn't want to read. And there were high levels books I did want to read, which is why I loved a banned books project that gave us the freedom to pick a book to do a creative, in any format you want, presentation of the knowledge from the book.
  So if I, a person who actually wanted to read and can read well hated Eng class, then people who have learning disabilities, are simply bored, didn't have parents who cared, etc were cooked. I guess that's why my college classmates are so incompetent rn...
  Also side note about Chinese (or well, Japanese in my case):
  Yeah, CN and JP use hanzi/kanji respectively, which are logograms, but both CN/JP have "alphabets" that can be used to tell you the reading of a word. Chinese uses pinyin (which is actually what most of their keyboards are based on I think), and JP has hiragana/katakana. It's still however more useful to learn the readings for these characters in the context of what you're reading (esp. Japanese, they got their writing system from China but used their own bastardized readings for words, so 生 has like 10+ readings depending on the word it's paired with).
  But they still have a neat trick in which kanji have two parts, the phonetic component, and the meaning component. Kanji are made of radicals, which is like using lego blocks to make a single character (i.e. 米 + 青 = 精). The neat part is that you can potentially guess the reading of a word if you already know that phonetic components reading. 青 can be read as "sei", and these kanji 精, 清, 圊, 睛, etc. all have "sei" or a similar version as a potential reading. Now sometimes the radicals don't always make sense meaning wise when added together. 青 is "blue/youth" and 米 is "rice", but 精 means "spirit/ghost", "energy", and uh... "semen" (mostly in the word 精液 "spirit fluid"). Why rice + youth = spirit or ghost, is beyond me, but these kanji usually have interesting stories behind them that could potentially explain their reasoning.
  JP Kanji Learning TLDR: JP is fun to learn and kanji have reading patterns based on their components.

The problem with comic books is that they're all about this big flashy pictures and they never have any words in them. Oh well, anyway, off to read some more Chainsaw Man and One Punch...

He looks absolutely enthralled by the wall of text lol.
God I'm remembering in Hunter X Hunter how there were entire spreads detailing complex rulesets for world building, and they legit felt like the silmarilion at times.

No one’s talking about anon’s weird assumption that authors go from idea directly to manga, and not that most authors start by writing a novel to attract a sponsor.

Shhhh, that would require actual understanding of the culture and not just laziness.

Fuck by chapter book I thought they're talking about Warhammer 40k novel about a specific Space Marine chapter and they're disappointed because they don't want to read 40k novels.

i thought "chapter book" meant a loooong novel being released in book sized chapters one by one like TV show episodes
- That’s how Wildbow does it.
You're in too deep brother!
Wew, I'm glad it's not just me, because it would actually be a reason I wouldn't read it.
No shade to 40k, it's just something I can recognize as a dangerous rabbit hole for me, personally.

I had to search it to understand the post. Well, that's a weird name to describe a normal book for children.

I can't read without pictures!

Ancient Egyptians be like:
And I think it's wrong that people expect me to!
Actually, I wonder if people who have difficulty visualizing from words would struggle to, like, make their own pictures.
- as a reader and writer with aphantasia, it's literally never once mattered to me. i love a good fantasy and just don't consider visualizing an obligate part of the experience. though i could definitely understand how it might be helpful
- As someone who has never been a big book reader (though I read tech manuals and news articles), I finally figured out I probably have aphantasia. This finally connected a lot of dots for me.

Anon has aphantasia

You can still enjoy reading if you have aphantasia. I can't picture shit, but verbose books tend to be my favourites.

Chapter books belong in the Chapter House (Dune)

you guys do realise the poster is making a joke I hope, no need to actually get upset about this

On one hand, yes, on the other... We had a student in our lab that started reading the Game of Thrones books because we were big fans. I think it was 2012. He had never read a book. Sure, magazines and stuff but never an entire book. He did go on to do a PhD.

what the fuck is a "chapter book"? does he mean a novel

comic books are fucking stupid

what the fuck is a “chapter book”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapter_book
It's a kind of book for children who are learning to read, which unlike a picture book (or, to some extent, a comic book) consists primarily of text that the reader must read in order to get the story.
Doesn't sound like you're any different than oop when it comes to pointlessly hating on something that others enjoy.
- Yes, some people enjoy poop. Why don’t you?

You can build up literacy like a muscle. I can read a lot if I forget to take my ADHD worsener (valproic acid), but even with that I can sometimes "rawdog" it.

This, I used to read a lot, even with my ADHD.
But for some reason I stopped, and now I struggle to focus reading.
- Brains gravitate to the quickest easiest dopamine responses, and will ignore things that give rewards slower. ADHD brains are particularly bad for this.
  I have the exact same issue. If I was able to give up scrolling social media, I'm sure I'd be back on the books again inside of a few weeks. We'll just have to wait for the great collapse.

I assume it's similar how I can't get in to manga, but I can enjoy a novel or animated stuff. Just can't seem to enjoy those black and white squares with questionable art in them. Just doesn't speak to me.

I'm not a huge manga fan myself, so I'll share the only one that's managed to make enough of an impression for me to read multiple works, and that's horror author Junji Ito.
He's usually got some disturbing, but unique and fairly talented art. Some of his stuff veers more towards ghost story, some dreamishly weird, and some straight up Cronenberg shit. His magnum opus "Uzumaki" is all three.
If you feel like giving it a chance, here's The Enigma of Amigara Fault, a shorter, tamer work that's a fairly common intro to his stuff.
- Not to mention they'll finally understand all those "THIS IS MY HOLE" references!
- Literally was going to recommend Ito... Shit is so good.
  The recent manga versions of H.P. Lovecraft's work have been cool too (with amazing cover art).
  Also someone who generally doesn't enjoy anime/manga, but there's some out there that I like.
Have you tried any that are criticallyhighly regarded? I certainly wouldn't describe the art in Akira or any of Otomo's books as "questionable". Obviously there's cheaper stuff out there but there is extremely high quality Manga.
- Also a lot of the more big name manga are shonen which can run the range of of "questionable" which makes it harder for westerners to get into. While seinen for example generally doesn't have as much fan service overall but its often times not as much or it is recontextualized as bad, for example that horse in Bezerk.
There's almost certainly manga you'd enjoy out there, but if you're not willing to dig through all the crap that's understandable. And because it's more niche it'll take more effort to discover the things you'd like.

I listen to audio books more often than reading an actual book.

I used to read physical books all the time when I was younger, but as I aged and audiobooks became downloads instead of massive multiple disc CD sets, I shifted. Isn't because I can't read anymore, and my eyes havent failed me yet that I need reading glasses, but I just like doing OTHER THINGS while reading. Plus I extra love when voice actors make it a PERFORMANCE. In ye old days it used to be just a narrator reading the words, often tonelessly, but Audible books these days are PERFORMANCES. I like popping on an audio book while im driving, while im in bed trying to fall asleep, and while im playing a grindy part in a video game. Or a video game that doesn't have voice acting so I can enjoy 2 stories simultaneously, or Roguelike video games where there's no story at all, or story beats only occur when you're at your home base.
- Some of them remind me of the old-timey radio shows from before TV. There was one I used to listen to when we had satellite radio that was about some private investigator for an insurance firm that would go around investigating fraud and, with the way they produced it, it felt like a full on murder mystery. Good stuff.
When I used to have a 60 minute commute to work (train to a short walk to a metro to another short walk) I would down audio books like a fiend on the train. I have a neurodevelopmental disorder that makes it difficult to maintain concentration and when the narrator does distinct voices or music for different characters/scenes/etc. it's easier for me to follow than books.

What’s a chapter book?

Most adults just call them ‘books’. But in case you want more, it’s a book with chapters like “Chapter 1 - in the beginning’ and so on. Very few pictures, lots of words. in the US, youth call them chapter books because it’s a moment of transition from reading short simple stories to books more than 100 pages long.
If you do the chapter crime, you do the chapter time. Chapter book ‘im, Dan-o.

I fucking knew 4chan was illiterate /s

HE IS?