A new study suggests that the complexity and severity of dyslexia varies across language barriers.

The authors, from the University of Hong Kong, said that Chinese-speaking children with the disorder may have a harder time with it than their English-speaking peers. The differences were seen in the brain and in the performance of Chinese children on visual and oral language tasks, the researchers said in a statement.

According to the researchers, English dyslexia is typically a “phonological disorder,” meaning that people with the condition have difficulties detecting or manipulating the sound structure of oral language. This leads to troubles in mapping speech sounds onto letters, Wai Ting Siok, a lead author of the study, said in a statement.

But the development of dyslexia in Chinese is really two disorders – a visuospacial deficit and a phonological disorder combined, Wai said.

The study can be found in the Oct. 12 issue of the journal Current Biology.

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A Chinese man, too cheap to buy a sheep dog has come up with a novel of way of getting his flock of sheep to do what he wants. By showing them a poster of a wolf.

Du Hebing told a Chinese newspaper that he took the picture by chance.

“After visiting Qinling Wild Animal Park, on the way home I saw a group of sheep walking along the road with a man holding a picture following behind them,” he said.

Du said he burst out laughing when he realised it was a picture of a wolf.

“The man was using the wolf picture to scare the sheep and drive them ahead – it was a really funny scene,” he said.

This modern day Bo Peep, might be onto something. We could put cardboard cutouts of Amy WInehouse in crack dens that will scare them off drugs for life.

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3. Millions of Chinese Kids Addicted to Online Games

Because of this, the Chinese government is calling for stricter monitoring of “unhealthy” Internet games, recommending that games should automatically log off once a set number of hours of continuous playing is reached. In 2006, Internet game developers were told to install technology that asks, or should we say demand, real name and identification number.

Li Jianguo, vice-chariman of the National People’s Congress said that Internet-addicted teenagers account for about 10 percent of China’s web users. With more than 200 million Internet users in China, that’s millions of “unhealthy” young Chinese and a huge business for “unhealthy” game developers.

But at times, I can’t blame these kids. They need some relaxation after competing at a young age at the Olympics or after a hard-days work manufacturing our cool iPhones or after lip-synching backstage because you’re not cute enough to be shown to the world. Okay, but please, when you relax, no “unhealthy” online games. Go play Halo3, instead.

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All you do is dial in to the access number and speak. The automated system will confirm what you said in English, using its monotone computer voice, then repeat it back to you in Mandarin. Babel can also translate from Mandarin into English.

This may not have any earth-shattering applications, but it’s novel. And hey, you never know when you might have a random need to communicate with someone in Chinese (outside of ordering the Kung Pao, which you probably already know how to do).

The service is free for the U.S., the U.K., and Australia using the numbers below:

• U.S.
  +1-718-513-2969
  +1-718-513-2968
• U.K.
  +44-203-3557628
  +44-203-0516561
• Australia
  +61-390-015794
  +61-390-011061

Incidentally, Google has also just revealed an iPhone-friendly version of its web-based Translate tool, accessible via mobile browser at translate.google.com. I’ve never felt so linguistically enabled.

Happy translating!

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