People overestimate the difficulty in learning different alphabets (and the assumed difficulty of the languages which use them).
I'm on vacation in Israel this week and learned the Hebrew alphabet with standard flash cards in 2 hours (incidentally by doing something similar to this post by remembering the names based on something the character looks like). At various points I've learned the Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets in a similar amount of time.
The real difficulty is, naturally, actually learning the language. The additional burden of it using a separate regular alphabet is negligible in comparison.
> The additional burden of it using a separate regular alphabet is negligible in comparison.
While trying to learn Thai and Arabic at varying points years ago, I was frustrated to find that so many of the books out there ignore the native alphabet/script and instead rely on various romanization or transliteration schemes. In many cases I found these schemes, particularly the IPA [1], just as hard or harder to learn than the native script and pronunciation.
I understand that IPA has it's place, particularly in academic circles and/or if there is no native speaker around to model for proper pronunciation, but if you're giving me an audio CD too, what's the point of the intermediary?
It's true that learning IPA as well can be rather annoying and time-consuming.
However, it can be extremely valuable, because it distinguishes between every consonant and vowel sound that exists in the language. Many times, there are far more sounds than letters -- for example, English has five vowels but at least three times as many distinct vowel sounds. Plus, many times these distinctions don't even exist in your native language, and it is very hard to even realize they are there in recordings, because you're not used to listening for them.
Learning the IPA pronunciations forces you to become aware of every sound in the language, and distinguish between different sounds in different words that you might otherwise go for years without detecting. It's a high-investment, high-reward learning technique, and ideally used together with audio recordings.
Agreed. When you don't know the language, knowing the alphabet is pretty useless. In Israel I recall being able to read signs.. and have no idea what I was actually reading.
On the other hand you do have languages like Chinese where learning the written language actually is the majority of the work. Spoken Chinese is probably one of the easier languages out there for a person coming from a random language.
I learned Cyrillic when I spent some time in Macedonia. Being able to read the alphabet was actually very useful, even without any further language knowledge. Being able to read street names, shop names, destinations on buses, etc all made the city much more accessible than without that.
Most languages also have a large number of words that an English speaker will recognise — and even more if they've ever learned any other language. Being able to transliterate at least lets you have a good chance of spotting some things you'll know. This is even more so in places where there'll be a large number of imported words, such as many restaurants, cafés, etc.
It really helps in a coffee shop to be able to get as far as choosing between 'Espreso', 'Kapuchino', 'Nas so sladoled', 'Makiyato malo', 'Makiyato golemo', 'Fredo', 'Frape', 'Ladno chokoladno mleko', 'Klasic crno chokolado', 'Klasic belo chokolado', or 'Meksikansko chokolado', rather than a board full of gibberish.
Well, my point was that simply learning the alphabet allows you to get as far as being able to turn that into Espresso, Kapuchino, etc which is hugely useful, even without knowing the language itself.
> On the other hand you do have languages like Chinese where learning the written language actually is the majority of the work. Spoken Chinese is probably one of the easier languages out there for a person coming from a random language.
As a student that is currently learning Chinese, the first sentence is true, from a Chinese perspective. The written language is extremely important for Chinese nationals; I've heard of all sorts of arguments from expats at my school, saying stuff like: "I just want to learn how to say X; when am I going to write it!?" Practically speaking, reading is much easier than writing (I can read way more than I can write) and once you hit a particular threshold of characters, you can read 90% of the text around you.
As for the second sentence, for a person with no background in tonal languages, learning the tones in Mandarin is extremely challenging. I assuming that the parent is a native English speaker. According to the Foreign Service Institute, Mandarin and Cantonese (you didn't specify what kind of Chinese) are among the hardest languages to learn for a native English speaker.[0]
I think Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) is difficult. And this is coming from a native English speaker with a background in Cantonese (my parents are from Hong Kong).
> As for the second sentence, for a person with no background in tonal languages, learning the tones in Mandarin is extremely challenging.
The biggest mistake of most Chinese learners is taking tones too seriously. Really, they aren't that important. If you screw up a tone in context you'll still be understood. Focus on words and grammar first, pronunciation isn't that important since most people have dialects. Cantonese people speaking mandarin can be quite entertaining though.
When I first moved to Beijing, I had problems getting the taxi drivers to understand me since I wasn't putting the 'er' behind everything, which is local dialect. Suffice it to say, I now speak with a Beijing accent.
> The biggest mistake of most Chinese learners is taking tones too seriously.
I'd like to add that this depends on where you are. The Taiwanese almost completely merge s/sh, z/zh, c/ch and also n/ng in some cases. You cannot distinguish between 4 and 10 without tones here. I have often heard that the Taiwanese rely more on tones, and Beijingers rely more on the actual sounds (as in Western languages).
Also, most of the time when people do not understand me, it is precisely because of the tones. I still often encounter situations where a friend will repeat my last sentence character for character, making me think "that's what I said!!", but apparently I didn't.
Reading is super easy, handwriting is a useless but fun hobby. Pronunciation is super tough.
(I am German, though - but if anything, I feel that we have it easier to pronounce Mandarin sounds.)
Eventually, you just start getting the tones right because you speak and listen so much. I can get by native sometimes (limited only by my bad vocabulary) and I've never study tones consciously for words I learn.
When I'm really tired, I sometimes change my 'sh' to 's' and sound more southern. Nobody really cares. However, I do screw up sometimes when saying words like "jichang" and "jingcheng," and will wind up on the wrong expressway in the taxi. This has not much to do with tones though.
"The biggest mistake of most Chinese learners is taking tones too seriously. Really, they aren't that important."
One of my friends, who is native Chinese insisted the tones are critical. I asked her how they understand lyrics in music since the tones get dropped in favor of the melody.
> According to the Foreign Service Institute, Mandarin and Cantonese (you didn't specify what kind of Chinese) are among the hardest languages to learn for a native English speaker.
But their criteria is the study time required to reach proficiency in both spoken and written language. Arguably, Chinese and Japanese wouldn't take so long to learn if they had simpler writing systems.
I will second this. A friend was trying to teach me the four different tones of the sh syllable, I had no clue what the hell was going on, they all sounded exactly the same.
I'm not even a native English speaker, I'm Greek, which also isn't tonal.
Interestingly enough, ancient Greek [1] did happen to be tonal even though modern Greek is not. More specifically, it had had pitch accent [2] which is somewhat different than fully tonal languages like Chinese but more involved than languages like English which have stress accent.
Ah, yes. The pronunciation changed over the years and nobody in recent memory can remember when Greek was tonal (I'm not entirely sure when this was), but we got rid of it about 60 years ago? My dad can remember writing in polytonic, but it didn't make any difference to pronunciation by then.
Spoken Chinese is much easier to learn than Japanese or French, in my experience. Coming from English, I find that the grammar isn't that difficult while word order is very relaxed. Since most native speakers have an accent or dialect anyways, there is no pressure to speak in a standard way (I find I'm more understandable when I talk as casually and loosely as possible).
I gave up on written Chinese a while ago. I can text well enough and do some simple IM conversations, basically my writing mirrors my oral skills fairly closely. But I can't read a sign, a notice, a newspaper, its almost another language and I'm not so interested in putting the effort in.
While visiting Israel I picked up the alphabet from the street signs and found it useful for identifying which sherut went to Jerusalem (their signs were in Hebrew only).
That's interesting. I consider the street signs evil. Ignoring streets for which even the Israelis I know don't know how to pronounce the name (for example אבן גברויל which GMaps lists as Ibn Gabriol but ends up as something different, whenever you talk to anyone).
Road signs in general wildy vary. The name 'Weizmann' (as in [1]) is generally butchered in latin script. The best form I found so far was in Acre and spelled 'Wiseman'.
Often the signs just contain a transcript of the Hebrew word. I saw a couple of signs that spell out 'Nemal', which isn't particularly helpful unless you know that this is the Hebrew word for the port.
Bottom line: The road signs here confuse the hell out of me. I'm amazed that they helped you learn the alphabet somehow.
> When you don't know the language, knowing the alphabet is pretty useless.
Knowing the Japanese hiragana and katakana means you can work out some menus in Japanese games - "startu"; "opshun"; etc. (This is not romaji, because they're using English words and a Japanese alphabet. So what's that called?)
Careful with gairaigo. Most of the time it doesn't mean what you think it means. Ever seen an ad for a mansion? In Japanese that refers to a type of apartment. I challenge anyone who has no prior knowledge to guess what 'Delivery Health' means.
Transliterated English is actually very useful for learning Korean, even if the meaning is a little twisted sometimes. Fully 25% of my Korean knowledge is transliterated English. It helps that Korea is probably the country with the highest English-fever in Asia.
Agreed. I memorised Hiragana and Katakana fairly quickly when learning Japanese, and even then, the language itself felt like it had some sort of logic to it (with good justifications for why some things are as they are), which made it easier to follow after learning the alphabets.
People think that it must be rock-solid because it's full of weird symbols. By the same token, the foreign person attempting to learn English might have a lot more trouble, for all its complexities and idiosyncrasies.
> People overestimate the difficulty in learning different alphabets (and the assumed difficulty of the languages which use them).
Indeed. I went to Bulgaria, and one of my friends learned Cyrillic on the bus ride from the airport to the hotel. Of course, Cyrillic is probably the easiest alphabet to learn for somebody who reads English and knows a bit of the Greek alphabet.
Yeah, alphabets are usually pretty easy to learn. I can read (and write) the two syllabic Japanese "alphabets" - really syllibaries - which only took a week or two to learn. Of course, you need to practise to get good at it.
Living in TLV for ~11 month now I salute you. It was quite a bit harder for me than '2 hours'. I do agree that knowing the alphabet (alephbet?) doesn't get you very far and the real challenge starts afterwards.
I .. am only learning passively by now. Lessons proved quite useless and at work I speak English anyway. Enjoy your stay!
I'm on vacation in Israel this week and learned the Hebrew alphabet with standard flash cards in 2 hours (incidentally by doing something similar to this post by remembering the names based on something the character looks like). At various points I've learned the Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets in a similar amount of time.
The real difficulty is, naturally, actually learning the language. The additional burden of it using a separate regular alphabet is negligible in comparison.