Braille Beginnings
For a number of years, I’ve wanted to learn to read Braille but never actually did it. Until today.
I wanted to learn by actually using my sense of touch and not just learning it visually. To this end, I had ordered a handy 6-dot braille cube so I could learn it on the go. I went to meet an old friend today and since I had a long bus ride, I used that time to learn the Braille for English alphabets and numbers using the cube.
I didn’t know this earlier but this is just uncontracted Braille. This works for short texts, but there are a host of abbreviations and contractions used to make the process of reading faster, especially when there is a lot to be read. I’d like to learn that in the future so that I can read Braille books.
Since the Braille script for English is designed in a simple way, it was quite easy to learn it. The first 10 letters of the alphabet each have their pattern and the rest can be derived by adding 1 or 2 dots to the bottom row of these 10 patterns — very simple to create an associative system to bootstrap learning.
This is also helping me compare the ways in which I learn two different scripts: Japanese kanji (and hiragana and katakana) and English Braille.
Association is making things a lot faster, and fun as well. Associating each character or pattern to things I already know makes for a fun and interesting challenge.
Having learnt just this much, I see how few natural opportunities there are around me to read Braille. The only place I found it today was in the elevator.
I also notice how much of our language uses references to sight.
Next steps:
- Learn contractions in English Braille
- Explore Braille for Indian languages
- Find some Braille books I’d like to read
Changelog:
originally written on 21 October 2023
