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How hard can it be to learn an alphabet? | ||
Tags: Alphabets | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 43 07 September 2013 at 12:26pm | IP Logged |
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Now I admit to feeling irritation when hearing someone say, oh Cyrillic is not hard, you can learn it in a couple
of hours. It is not quite that simple. But I have at different periods of time in my life learnt (and sometimes forgotten) the Arabic, the Hebrew, the Cyrillic, the Greek and obviously the Latin alphabets. I would say that you can get a fairly good grasp of it in a week. The alphabet. Not the language. But for me it often works to write words from my own language in the new alphabet to help me read easier. I was therefore a bit surprised when I read an article about Azerbaijani, where they have evidently changed alphabets three times over the last century, (Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic, new Latin) and where the argument was that adults could not read street signs or newspapers, and students could not read literature because they did not know the other alphabet. Now, I have struggled enough with the Cyrillic alphabet to know that it is no walk in the park, but it still shares a number of letters with the Latin alphabet. I would think that if Cyrillic street names turned up in Oslo I would have been able to recognise the names fairly fast. The librarian said that young people could not read the literature from the last 60 years because of the Cyrillic spelling, or the traditional literature because of the Arabic spelling. I talked to my daughter about this, and she said, "Why don't they just learn the two other alphabets? How difficult can that be if you know the language the texts are written in? I would also think that some people would know foreign languages with Latin alphabets, which would help them in the task. What is it I am not seeing here? The thumb rule is that you learn what you need to learn, and here most of the population needs to learn at least one extra alphabet to have full functionality in their own language. Why would that be so hard? Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 07 September 2013 at 3:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5054 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 2 of 43 07 September 2013 at 12:34pm | IP Logged |
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That's not so hard objectively. But people do not need it badly, that's why it's not
learned. In the former Yugoslavia young people (outside of Serbia, the Serbian republic in Bosnia and Macedonia) did not know the Cyrillic alphabet. As a result I can understand a text in their language, while they cannot! One more thing is that if you are not used to an alphabet, it takes more time to read. And we do not like reading slowly in our mothertongue. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| caam_imt Triglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 4860 days ago 232 posts - 357 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, Finnish Studies: German, Swedish | Message 3 of 43 07 September 2013 at 12:54pm | IP Logged |
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Let's not forget that for a lot of people, it's just not fun nor interesting to delve
into language related affairs. While objectively it's not so hard to learn a new alphabet compared to learn a new language, the point is the same for those people: why should they bother? maybe you can recognize Cyrillic in the streets of Oslo, but the kind of political and social implications of such a change in Norway (if it were to happen) would upset a lot of people, I suppose. That would be enough to create a negative attitude towards the new alphabet and people might just refuse to learn it, no matter how easy it is. I actually don't know much about Azerbaijan, so I don't know if what I said applies to them. But changing alphabets implies a kind of change (lifestyle perhaps?), and some people sometimes don't want stuff to change at all. Thus they don't even think whether it's easy or not to learn. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4907 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 4 of 43 07 September 2013 at 1:12pm | IP Logged |
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I have been a Hindi learner for a long time, but people who are thinking about learning Hindi are often put off by the sizeable Devanagari alphabet: it technically has 46(+) letters, depending on how you count them. But vowels are written differently when following a consonant, and consonants which don't have a vowel between them become conjuncts. So it is undeniably difficult. But for the average Hindi learner from the west, it is actually the easiest part of learning Hindi.
I have had this conversation with some Hindi learners. They say they want to learn Hindi, but they don't want to learn the alphabet. I tell them that the language itself is much harder than the alphabet, and they reply, "Maybe for you, but not for me." I have yet to see one of these people progress beyond the very basics, because they soon learn that a language is not something you can learn in a few months in your spare time. (By the way, Solfrid, the idiom is "rule of thumb", never "thumb rule".) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| anime Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6358 days ago 161 posts - 207 votes Speaks: Spanish, Swedish*, English Studies: German, Portuguese, French, Russian | Message 5 of 43 07 September 2013 at 1:47pm | IP Logged |
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Cyrilic Alphabet is really easy for me, but the Arabic alphabet looks like bird spillings :P
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4857 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish | Message 6 of 43 07 September 2013 at 2:06pm | IP Logged |
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Please remind me to reply when I'll finally learn Georgian and Armenian alphabet. Edited by prz_ on 07 September 2013 at 2:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4826 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 7 of 43 07 September 2013 at 2:36pm | IP Logged |
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By the way, I rather liked Cristina's fresh version of an old idiom, and it was perfectly
understandable by all. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 8 of 43 07 September 2013 at 3:17pm | IP Logged |
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Thank you Jeffers for correcting the expression (too close to Norwegian I am afraid). Writing in a foreign
language when you have a blistering head ache is about as smart as drinking and driving ( or should I say drunkdriving to give it my own Norwegian twist :-) and thank you montmorency for making me smile. The combination of the two of you was perfect :-) Looking over my post I realised I had made another mistake. I had written " walk in the part" in stead of "walk in the park". And I am afraid I cannot come up with any viable excuse for that one... Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 07 September 2013 at 3:20pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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