What is Dyslexia
First off, for those who do not understand what dyslexia is I will explain. As defined by the Mayo Clinic “Dyslexia is a learning disorder that involves difficulty reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words (decoding). Also called reading disability, dyslexia affects areas of the brain that process language.” We most commonly hear about the typical switching the letters b and d or p and q, however; it is much more complex. From person to person it is different. In my case before I learned to manage it, I would skip whole lines of text in a book or read something out loud with it sounding like another language because I could not read the word right. In my case it would also mess with my ability to spell words correctly.
Dyslexia and the Korean Language
Now let us focus on the last line of that definition on dyslexia. “Also called reading disability, dyslexia affects areas of the brain that process language.” It highly effects language comprehension. Now this does effect people differently, keep that in mind. This makes learning another language quite difficult, especially one that heavily relies on characters in the form of symbols rather than the standard romanization we are use to in the English language. For example, hello is written out in Korean Hangul is 안녕하세요. Looking at this word and being familiar with the Korean alphabet, (which I will post a picture of bellow), most of these will look similar. As one with dyslexia, it has made learning the language much harder, but not impossible.
The Trick
The tricks I use to help teach myself the language besides repetition and memorization is by using correlation. When I was first learning the Hangul alphabet, I assigned each character with a mental image that describes both the shape and sound such as for ㄱ which has a g sound I assigned it as gun or ㅂ which has a b/p sound with bucket. This helps because the character looks like the word and the sound is similar. The other tool I use is labeling. I will go around and label things in my home with a sticky note with both hangul and romanization written on it to help with linking.
Image acquired from MeridianLinguistics.com