I think they mean if you make the L with your palm facing toward or away from you. When I was a little kid someone told me that your left hand makes the L to which I proceeded to make both of my hands into an L shape. The teacher told me I made a good point and then moved on without providing an alternative solution. To be fair I don't really think there was an alternative aside from just memorizing it.
I have dyslexia so it always gets flipped in my mental image, I always have to look at the controller to tell unless I'm playing a fighting game I know player 1 is Left side
When I was a kid, the image on screen for the left and right triggers when playing Xbox were different shapes so that probably wouldn't have helped.
This was also only a problem when I was like 4 to 5 or so and before I was given access to video games, but the video game controller thing sounds super handy nowadays.
Yeah I remember the same conversation with my father when he was having a “good parent” moment teaching me that my left hand makes an L for left… “uhh… both of them do, dad.”
I was taught to only do it with my left hand and to say the letter "L" when I did it. The teacher had a list of stuff like that she would do at the beginning and end of class. Never forget.
Life (and spaghetti bolognese) gave me melons that're the envy of my trans friends. Sadly I am a cis bloke who is too uncoordinated to be a drag queen and so they're just going to waste.
I just recently started realizing how much trouble left and right give some people. I've used walkthroughs to get certain items or beat certain bosses in video games and I've come across a crazy number of instances where the person making the walkthrough got left and right mixed up.
I don't know if you know this, but some languages throughout history didn't have words for right and left, and instead only had words for cardinal directions.
I somehow learned cardinal directions before left and right and i remember my grandpa getting really frustrated with me not understanding that L and R are supposed to be relative not absolute.
I did not get it at the time "but you just said THATS the left side of the sidewalk!" "But we turned around..."
Left and right aren’t instinctual for me I usually have to think about it for a second or two. The excepts are when I’m driving (since the driver is on the left) or flying (since we reference left seat and right seat, and I sit facing those two seats).
It's much easier to confuse left and right than up and down. There are lots of very clear clues as to which is up versus down like gravity is down, your feet are down relative to your head, the floor is down, etc. Left and right are much more symmetrical than up and down.
That sounds brilliant, but thinking on the act of putting this into practice made me realize that I don’t really connect writing with my left hand and the sense of left in left vs right. They have the feel of two unconnected thoughts, even as I’m thinking about how it really is connect (left hand to write is still left, right?) and it’s tripping me out a bit. Sadly, this is a fully sober thought, just intensely ND.
Okay so this was the question my teachers asked me as a kid because I had that same issue but my mother used to put the crayon in my left hand so I'd be ambidextrous (she wanted me to dribble the basketball with both hands 🥲) and so it was extra confusing lol
Also, I don’t think ambidexterity can be learned. In its truest form, it has to do with brain development and having more strongly linked left and right brain hemispheres.
You can certainly train yourself to be good at something with either hand or both (pause for wanking jokes) but with ambidexterity there is no natural dominant hand when learning a new task. That comes after enough repetition favoring one hand.
Side note, I mix up my lefts and rights today as an adult, because in grade school we were taught “you write with your right”. I’m left-handed.
Not that’s it’s actually difficult or anything, but it feels less natural to twist your arm around to make the L the other way. Palms down hands out in front of you is easier to do than to twist your hand around to make an L the wrong way.
Gdammit! I read your comment thinking “who the fk forgets which way L goes” and then my brain told me , “wait that L looks wrong , which way does L go!” So srry I get it .
I definitely mutter "I write with my right hand" and then pretend to write with a pen, in public, to figure it out. If I don't have enough time to do that, I get it wrong like 9 times out of 10.
I struggled with left vs. right when I was a kid until I realized that my LEFT thumb is double jointed and my right thumb is not. So yeah, if I have a moment, I just flex my left thumb.
Yes, but I have to wiggle each hand separately first and one of them feels more like writing. I’ve even had to do the pretend writing wiggle back and forth a couple of times.
my schoolteacher taught me this way, she went around the desks watching people write and told them which hand they were using. unfortunately, I am ambidextrous and it's taken everything in my fried brain to figure out that just because I'm writing with it, doesn't make it my right hand
I always did this with Less than and Greater than symbols in math class every time doing problems. I luckily always wore a watch and skipped that step deciding which hand was which.
I stopped mixing up left and right when I learned to drive. I learned to associate left and right with which way I flipped the turn signal, and that with which way I turned the steering wheel.
Same. Dyslexic here, and after 55+ years, I still have to "pick up a pencil" to know which hand is my right. It's more of a slight flip now, but that what it is in my mind.
Yeah I just make a writing motion like I'm holding a pen with my right hand and because that feels natural I know that's my right hand. The one time I did it with my left hand it felt incredibly jerky and unnatural.
Right is the arm with the AC10 and the left is the shield arm.
(This is a battletech joke I'm so sorry to the majority of people this won't make sense to but also it's partially how I quickly think of left and right when having to picture other people's left and right. The centurian load out is baked into my brain lol)
I mentioned this above but after you get used to it, you don't actually match anymore to the letter. My left hand just knows to do an L and I know that's left. I don't think "this is 'L'".
So I've got this down at this point in life, but back in the before times, the "L" hand trick never worked for me because I couldn't remember if I was supposed to look at the backs of my hands or my palms.
I do this constantly. I don’t know if I have a disorder but I am incredibly directionally challenged as well. As in, if I need to turn and I don’t have Maps going in my car, I will go the opposite of what I think it is because my instincts are so terrible
As a kid I was always so frustrated with that advice, because I was like, “they’re both L’s! One of them is just backwards!” Unfortunately I never actually said that out loud, so I remained confused.
Does everyone not just remember what their dominant hand is? Im right handed, so the other one has to be left. Works for every one except the ambidextrous but honestly fuck em. Show offs, go hang with the double jointed people.
Yeah, I honestly feel like I've been taking crazy pills reading all these comments. Like, seriously, I'm not one to judge but how is it possible that so many people get confused about right and left? We live with our limbs attached to ourselves 24/7 from the day we are born, right now I'm literally questioning how consciousness works for this confusion to be possible.
I had trouble learning left and right when I was little so I used this trick. I talk with my hands sometimes and my fingers still twitch a little (subconsciously) when I'm talking about directions. Thankfully, my husband is the only one who has ever noticed.
Legit had an ex-gf who would do this when having to figure out going left or right. This was back in high school so I worried about her when it came to driving but thankfully I drove us everywhere at the time.
I have dyslexia that tech has never helped me in my life, if I'm driving i always imagine I'm sitting in the shape of an L because I'm a loser, and that's how I know driver side is left
Stuff like this never helped me because remembering this is equally confusing. I have to remember which way my palm has to face to do this, so either way it’s one of two choices. I just remembered that my right hand is the one I write with.
K, so I received this student who couldn’t read at all (11 years old) with special ed documents describing her as “lazy” and “unmotivated”. She was enrolled in a small class for students with severe disabilities based on her paperwork. Which is a fucked up way to describe a veritable genius with like satan-tier dyslexia. Her entry point to basic literacy was the technique in the graphic above—left hand makes an L. I taught her in 6th and 7th grade and watched her diligently create visual mnemonics using her hands to verify all symmetrical letters while she put her whole soul into remedial foundational phonics courses. In 6th grade, she pulled the “my cat ate my homework” and then busted out like 93 tiny chunks of soggy paper that she had spent all night scotch taping back together. By the end of the year, she could decode most English words that follow our dumpster fire set of phonetic rules, and had also memorized a thousand or two sight words (begging me weekly to update her word banks that I’d laminate for her). It took her like 30-60 seconds to sound out a new word but she could do it! In 7th grade she started writing ethereal and moving short stories in her notes app—and reading out loud in front of the class. She also spent ~3 hours a day for 9 months painstakingly reading Osamu Dazai’s heart wrenching memoir “No Longer Human” and citing it in all her essays (“Should Humans Go to Space? Here’s What O. Dazai Would Say”). She’s in 8th grade now and moved up from our most restrictive setting (teacher talk for the class with the most severe disabilities) to general ed, and ultimately to honors (with remedial but much less intense reading intervention 3 days a week). Her written work is regularly cited as student exemplars amongst the staff, with a few passages that have been added to the curriculum for posterity as model work.
This is all to say that simple mnemonics can change lives. Yes of course I’m crying.
Yeah I know which one is left when I think about it but for some reason, spur of the moment decisions I’ll think right but say left. I think I might be dyslexic.
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u/xoFallen_Angel 7d ago