Courtesy of the ineffable -no, no, scratch that -indispensible, inexhaustable, unescapable and undescribable Robert Johanson, comes this really cool video presentation on Chinese characters, and this one, too.
Western characters, it turns out, are read with the left side of the brain, and Chinese characters with the right side, so people who are dyslexic in English apparently are not necessarily so in Chinese. Particularly interesting is how nuerologically hard-wired into the brain these writing systems are, which would suggest that in order to be genuinely bi-lingual, starting to learn both writing systems at a relatively young age would be essential.
