School was torture - and it never stopped until I was able to go to college and get away from everyone I'd grown up around. What a relief! But yeah, I hand wrote everything as well. I was in college in the early 90s, and when I wrote my senior thesis, I had to do it on a computer. So this was early WordPerfect, I think, I don't remember now the exact program they had us using. Up to that point everything was written longhand, no matter how many pages.

I've found I can recognize some words when they're spoken in Japanese, but I have a hard time getting my brain and mouth to cooperate enough to talk. My auditory processing is also slow, so sometimes people speak to me in regular English and I have to ask them to repeat themselves a few times. I can hear just fine, but it's like the words are just garbled.