Just Enough to Know Better

[pne]

Just ordered Just Enough to Know Better, a book that teaches sighted people to read Braille (it was recommended as a resource on this personal website).

Tried ordering through the website first, but the credit card validation routine they used didn't like my address. (I've heard that address verification does not, in general, work very well for non-US addresses, except maybe Canadian ones.)

When I selected Germany as the shipping address, the order form suggested that I call in the order if it's to outside the US and Canada, so I tried that this evening (when it would be daytime in the US). The first time around, I forgot the country code after the carrier preselection code, so that went wrong; the second time, after dialling the extension number I wanted, I got a man saying "Hello?" and hanging up.

Third time lucky; I got Alyson (?) and she took the order for me. She was pretty nice about it, and didn't seem to mind that my address is not in standard American format. So let's hope I'll get the book sometime soon :) She said that they'd bring it to the post office this week, and that I could expect it to take about three weeks by standard post.

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

My father bought that and I have his copy downstairs. It's a nice, good, gradual approach to Braille. It has exercises that start in grade one, then start adding more and more elements of grade two.

The only problem I have, is I forget which ones it thinks I know, and I get confused when I try to read things like i-n-g and go, wait, that can't be right, because then it'd be ing, but then I remember, no, it's not doing ing yet. But it's a fairly good book to practice with.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Hee! Yeah, I had that when looking at a couple of Braille games on a website somewhere. Reading uncontracted Braille can be a bit weird when you've learned at least some contractions.

I wonder what my German Braille would look like to a fluent reader; I've only learned very few contractions so far but I'm tempted to use the one for 'en' all the time (dots 1-4, i.e. letter 'c' in uncontracted Braille) and wonder whether it'd be confusing when most of my text is uncontracted but the 'c' is meant to be a contraction.

I think they re-use four letters - c q x y - to represent letter combinations in contracted Braille, since those letters are fairly uncommon[*] in German; if you do mean that letter, you have to "escape" it with dot 6 before, which is also used for apostrophe.

[*] Well, 'c' is uncommon by itself; it nearly always occurs in the sequences 'ck', 'ch', and 'sch', all of which have contractions of their own.