Synaesthesia

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I'd say it's probably the sound-grapheme mix, although numbers also get colors that don't seem to correspond to any of the Latin alphabet sounds in their names. But I built those connections much earlier. (<7> is a bright teal color but <seven> is mostly yellow, gray and salmon.) I'm not sure the kana had associations when I was first learning but I also didn't know what synesthesia was or that I had a form of it until much later in my schoolding either. BUT I'm willing to lean toward the sound-grapheme theory since, for example, the K- row tends to have orangy hues like <k> in the Latin alphabet, and the N- and M- rows tend to be very warm colors like <n> and <m> and so on. It's not the exact colors that I see for English combos but they've definitely affected each other.

Do the letters remain the same colour across languages?

[linguistcat]

Do the letters remain the same colour across languages?

Yes, even if the pronunciations are different, like <j> in many languages.

[Xhin]

Having letter-color synesthesia however, I will read "C flat" as a series of the colors pale orange, lime green, almost white gray, transparent, and medium blue. And those letters are always those colors to me, regardless of where or when I read them or the actual colors they are printed in. I can ignore these colors for the sake of doing other things, like if I'm taking a test where I have to say what color a word is printed as but the impressions of the letter's colors in my mind are still there.

Thanks for sharing this; it's really interesting. Have you ever learned a language with a different writing system? If so, does this ability make things easier?

When I was learning Chinese, I noticed that almost every character was orange or green or some combination of the two (radicals tended to be orange). Boxier shapes are instead yellow. Sometimes I perceive the entire character as a single color, other times it has individual shapes in it that take on colors distinctly -- this is probably due to a lifetime of reading simple Roman letters. Something like 你好吗 looks green, then the second character is yellow and orange, then the last character is yellow and a little bit blue in the bottom-right.

It being based on shapes makes a certain amount of sense, like I also perceive ПД as yellow followed by orange, however that doesn't explain why A and 4 are bright red while 好 and ПД have the same colors.

[Wyvern]

Hope this thread isn't too old, not too used to forums in general and I'm new here, but I wanted to add my 2c.

Sounds to me like the OP most likely has synesthesia. I felt the same, I'm autistic and as a kid a lot of stuff was brushed off (obviously, my family is all neurodivergent too and didn't know), and so my response later on just became annoyance and anger. 'You're not special, everyone gets that!', yeah, like saying 'I do this quirky thing called breathing'.

I associate letters and days of the week with colours, apparently A being red is rather common, S is sandy gold, Q is yellower gold, and some are just vague 'blue and green'. Monday is dark blue, Tuesday is red, Wednesday is purple/blue, Thursday is orange, Friday is red, Saturday and Sunday are gold/yellow. I do remember in primary school having coloured letters and days of the week hung up around classes, so that may be where it's from. They're all arbitrary things to remember, and childhood associations have a long time to be strengthened.

As I was reading the wiki article, it brought up something else which I didn't know could be counted as synesthesia, but I visualise tetris when I do maths. Addition and subtraction illicit much more visual reactions. Pairs of numbers that add up to multiples of 10 just look like they fit together. 8 and 2 look like they physically fit together in my head, 7 and 3, 6 and 4, etc. (they do not look like they fit together on paper, however). I think that must've just been the roundabout association I made learning maths as a very little kid, because multiplication and divison illicit a much less visual response, but there's still non-specific feelings of correctness.

Also as I've been learning to hear music more and use my ears to recognise intervals and tones, I have been intentionally trying to remember tones, and have associated them with vowels. The only one I can remember is that the D string on a guitar is /oʊ/. I'm not forcing myself to imagine specific vowels, I just hear it and focus 'what vowel does that remind me of'. Flatness is associated in my mind with backness and roundness, and sharpness with frontness (which makes sense). It's been an intentional exercise to use those associations to help me remember and hear, so it's not necessarily natural, but not necessarily forced.

I also have aphantasia, so that might explain why some colours are vague. I know what things look like, but I just can't see them and command them in my 'minds eye'. Meanwhile I can perfectly imagine what music sounds like, I can play songs in my head that I know, I can predict the next tone in a series (e.g. hear E A D and audiate what the G should be, still practicing that though). Can't imagine intervals so well, but I use songs for reference. I tune my guitar and instead of thinking 'sharp or flat' I think 'fur elise or jaws?'. There's also abstract textures to various chords, intertwined with song associations.

(Being able to remember songs you know very well is obviously a normal thing; this video on the Levitin Effect is rather neat, and inspiring for those of us without perfect pitch:
https://youtu.be/x1CBPV1_uTI)

I'd say a lot of this is relatively normal, again being autistic means it's hard to say for certain (though I subscribe to the idea that everyone has some degree of neurodivergence), but I'd imagine if there's anything odd it's likely my brain doubling down on otherwise normal mechanisms of association or making odd connections (tetris and maths) to give some grounding to arbitrary information.

There's also strong assocations between smells for me, in particular a certain brand of cherry blossom hand soap reminds me of two awful relationships. That may be more trauma related though.

Hopefully this long post is welcome, because for as long as I've used the internet I always seemed to love writing really long posts.