Is it possible to be dyslexic in Chinese?

[Kire]

Dear Cecil:

Is it possible to be dyslexic in Chinese? Surely someone with dyslexia wouldn't be likely to misconstrue a word's meaning if that word were represented as a distinctive symbol as in Chinese, right? I mean, if you were to show a dyslexic a picture of a house, that person would still easily recognize it, even though he might have trouble deciphering the written word. Or am I totally in the dark about dyslexia? --Rudy, Vallejo, California

PS: Is it true that the order of letters in a word is unimportant in reading, aside from the placement of the first and last letter? I have tried this and it seems pretty plausible.

Cecil replies:

One thing at a time, bud.

More: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050408.html

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. Misconceptions about Chinese

While there is indeed one character for each meaningful unit (not necessarily a word; there are some characters that are used only in compounds), they are not totally arbitrary.

All Chinese characters are made up of 215 components called "radicals," and the radicals may hint at the meaning of the character while the remainder of the strokes may hint at its pronunciation.

For example, the character for "plum tree" is made up of the character for "tree" along with the character for "every." The "tree" part (some characters are themselves radicals) obviously indicates the category of meaning, but the "every" part is there because in Chinese, both "every" and "plum" are pronounced "mei."

Because characters actually are put together according to a system, memorizing hundreds or thousands of them isn't as hard as you might think. People think I'm joking when I say that the first five hundred are the hardest, but it's true. Once you get past that point, all the characters look vaguely familiar, and when you're really into studying them, you can often guess the pronunciation and meaning from the combination of sound and meaning elements.