No, as far as I know I'm not dyslexic, and I suspect it would have come up in my life by now if I were.
The way I read is a lot like certain old speed reading trainers used to teach, where I'm able to pick up the meaning of the whole sentence or several lines without stopping on each word separately. That's what I meant by "blocks," like several lines of a page at once.
I can read the one-word-at-a-time way. I have to if I'm reading out loud, for example, and sometimes for very dense text, it's worth it to slow down that far like I might if I were asking someone to explain something slowly if it were difficult to process.
That is exactly my perceived experience and has been useful to me to read but I have immense difficulties spelling. Essentially can speed ready by shape and contextual grammar clues but cannot form the internal shape of the word. I had thought it was an adaptive response to dyslexia, fun to see others with it as a non-adaptive response. I also have a similar response to dense text where it's necessary/useful to slow down to fully grok.
Orthogonally I have excellent memory and pattern recognition for numbers so it's a fun mystery. Vision itself is such an interesting sense and it's super interesting how languages can feedback into the perception mechanisms.
Spelling hasn't ever been tough for me, but it's like I think of words in their entirety, one unit that includes all the letters. When I type, even with just my thumbs on a phone, I'm not spelling the words out, but rather typing the whole word, which essentially has a specific series of movements to represent it.
How did you find out you were dyslexic, and how does it affect your perception of letters or numbers? I know very little about dyslexia, but it's certainly interesting that the only other person I've encountered who reads like I do has it!
It's interesting, especially given the way that I read, when I start to try to spell out the word. It's like zooming into an artifacted picture. The picture starts out very clear but as I zoom in it gets fuzzy. What ordering the letters go in or what sounds come out of specific lettering combinations get "fuzzy" in my head when I go through the process of reproducing the entire word. It really bit me in college studying German with the "ie" "ei" letter combinations. I overcome it with intense memorization or eventual mnemonic recollection buts it's always fuzzy.
I didn't realize I was dyslexic until about 15 years ago (post college) due to my girlfriend at the time suggesting I get tested as I just assumed this was an area I was "stupid". This gets back into the upbringing where I was fostering interpersonal behaviors as weaknesses or personal failures due to my relationship with my father.
My kindergarten class had a practice that, now that you say that, might have been meant to help those letter-sound associations.
Besides routinely reciting the alphabet forward and backward (I didn't know being able to recite the alphabet backward was unusual until I was in high school!), we would also do a phonetic version that sounded something like, "A, ah. B, buh. C, kuh. D, duh. E, eh," making a sound for every letter.
I don't know if it helped the kids who didn't already know how to read, but those were some of the peak years for phonics instruction in primary schools, so I guess at least someone thought it was working!
Sesame Street also had this song where they would pronounce the whole alphabet as though it were one really long word, like, "Ab-keh-def-ghee-jeckel-menop-qwur-stu-vwix-is." That one always made me laugh, but I got good practice out of it!
I was mildly afraid that you were going to describe something that would make me go, "Wait--am I dyslexic?" but no, I don't experience spelling that way. Most words exist in my head in both written and spoken form inseparably. It's very rare that I mix up homophones when I'm writing, for example, because I'm not trying to put the sound of a word into letters or match letters to the sound if the word. The letters and the sounds are inextricably linked in each specific meaning unit.
The way I read is a lot like certain old speed reading trainers used to teach, where I'm able to pick up the meaning of the whole sentence or several lines without stopping on each word separately. That's what I meant by "blocks," like several lines of a page at once.
I can read the one-word-at-a-time way. I have to if I'm reading out loud, for example, and sometimes for very dense text, it's worth it to slow down that far like I might if I were asking someone to explain something slowly if it were difficult to process.
Is any of that like your experience?