causes some reading difficulty on my part

[ohmyrichard]

Hi, guys. My pen pal is using his laptop to write emails to me. Maybe his laptop goes wrong sometimes or when his emails reach me, they are misdecoded, his emails always have many &#39's, whose meaning I always fail to make out. I want to tell him about this problem. My question is: Can I say in my email to him that these strange signs may be caused by misdecoding and causes some reading difficulty on my part? I mean, is "causing some reading difficulty on my part" acceptable and natural to native speakers' ears? Are there any better versions of the same sentence? I googled this sentence structure just now but failed to get anything very valuable.
Thanks in advance.
Richard

[David L.]

It's an encoding problem his end, or decoding your end - I think, for the apostrophe sign.

See RSS Google and "'" Problem
and Google '

"It makes some of your emails hard to understand."

Mention to him that this is a common problem and direct him to the site above or to Google ' to show him what you mean. It would be interesting for you both to track down the problem...and a work-around solution.

PS
That's interesting! Note what happens when I merely try to copy and past those symbols from your post into this post: this website reproduces them as Google ' It's converted them back to AN APOSTROPHE!

[Neillythere]

Hi ohmyrichard

The easiest thing to do is to tell him:

I'm picking up some spurious characters in your emails, on my computer. I'm not sure what's causing it, but typical examples are:

example 1
example 2 etc

Try to give examples of where it occurs, in different contexts and ask if he has any suggestions as to what might be causing it. It could be, possibly, the different keyboard languages that you are using, where your keyboard language doesn't have a character for the keycode that his computer is sending.

With a few examples, you should be able to understand where it typically occurs, which should give clues on a "workaround".

Hope this helps
NT