I’m so happy to have found this forum! I’m only 13, but it really encourages me to see that there are people who do very similar things to me.
Like many people on the forum, I can instinctively count the number of letters in a word or in a sentence. (Although I don’t count spaces or punctuation, I do usually count apostrophes?) Particularly for shorter words or phrases, I can do this practically without thinking. I have been doing this since as long as I can remember, but I never thought it was something unique to me. I only realised that it was quite rare when I was doing crosswords with my sister a couple of years ago and she was shocked at how quickly I could tell her the lengths of words. Whilst I know other people who can kind of do the same thing, such as my dad and one of my friends, they can’t do it anywhere near as fast as I can. I knew that there must be other people who could do it like me, but I’ve never met anyone who can so it’s great to hear about other people with the same skill! Everyone who finds out about it thinks it’s really cool, and it’s great for entertainment, but it can often get frustrating when I’m trying to read or when someone is talking to me, and I can’t help but do it.
My method for working it out is a bit confusing. I sort the letters into number bonds to 10. For example, if the sentence was ‘The cat sat on the mat’. For ‘the cat sat’, I can tell straight away that it has nine letters. Then, with the word ‘on’, I take the O, add that on to the nine letters, put that ten aside, and carry over the letter N and keep going. I can do this in less than two seconds. It’s complicated, but I’d be really interested to know if anyone does a similar thing.
My spelling has always been very good, as has my grammar, and English is one of my favourite subjects. I’m also generally considered quite smart? I don’t know if that has anything to do with it...
Something that really irritates me when I’m counting letters in sentences, particularly when reading, is when a sentence doesn’t have an even number of letters, or particularly if it isn’t a round number (like 10, 20, 30 etc.) A lot of the time, I change around words or add extra characters (even though this sometimes doesn’t make the sentence grammatically correct) just so that it ends in an even number or in a round number.
Another counting habit that I have is the number of stairs in a staircase. I always need to start with my right foot and finish with my right foot as well (therefore an even number of steps.) If the staircase doesn’t have an even number of steps and I have to finish with my left foot, I always change them around so that I finish with my right. At my primary school, I memorised the number of steps in every single staircase so that I would know where I would need to change foot.
This is nowhere near as serious as the compulsions and obsessions of many other people on this forum, but I just thought I’d share it because it’s great to be able to talk about it to people who do similar things and who can actually understand :)
