Gyokuto Motiduki

As a fellow aphant from Japan, I resonated with your experience so much! I’ve always felt that for us, learning Kanji isn't about memorizing a "picture," but rather understanding a logical recipe of radicals. Since our brains prefer structural data over visual imagery, the systematic nature of Hanzi/Kanji actually becomes an advantage. This is exactly why I find that I can read Classical Chinese and even get the "gist" of modern Chinese texts just by following the semantic traces of the characters. Interestingly, though, I struggle with Hangul. Even though it’s part of the same cultural sphere, Hangul is phonetic—it's a "sound script." For my aphant brain, it’s much easier to decode logograms (which are like high-density data packets of meaning) than it is to process pure phonetic symbols that don't have those built-in semantic hooks. It’s fascinating to realize that what many see as a "visual" language is actually a "logical" one for people like us!

I approach these problems through pattern recognition. This method works well for me, but in IQ tests, my scores were lower because of the time limit. It takes more time to logically process the patterns than to simply "visualize" them, even though the result is just as accurate.