How hard can it be to learn an alphabet? (Questions About Your Target Languages) Language Learning Forum

How hard can it be to learn an alphabet?
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Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages

43 messages over 6 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next >>

Josquin
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Germany
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Message 25 of 43

09 September 2013 at 2:15pm | IP Logged

Cristina, I hate to remind you, but you actually said this yourself (source: TEAM MIR Team Thread):

Solfrid Cristin wrote:

tarvos wrote:

I personally just learned the alphabet in a couple hours, moderately practicing the sounds, and then went and read from there. After a week the alphabet posed no problems whatsoever - pronunciation was another matter entirely.

I hate you :-) Here you take something I am still struggling with after years of learning Russian and tell us you learned it in a week. Do you have any idea how depressing that is?

Also note that two messages later you said this:

Solfrid Cristin wrote:

I officially hate you both :-)

I think geoffw simply took you by your word. ;)

Edited by Josquin on 09 September 2013 at 2:16pm
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tarvos
Super Polyglot
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China
likeapolyglot.wordpr
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Message 26 of 43

09 September 2013 at 2:17pm | IP Logged

Oh, hate me or love me...
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Solfrid Cristin
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Message 27 of 43

09 September 2013 at 2:27pm | IP Logged

Josquin wrote:

Cristina, I hate to remind you, but you actually said this yourself (source: TEAM MIR Team Thread):

Solfrid Cristin wrote:

tarvos wrote:

I hate you :-) Here you take something I am still struggling with after years of learning Russian and tell us you learned it in a week. Do you have any idea how depressing that is?

Also note that two messages later you said this:

Solfrid Cristin wrote:

I officially hate you both :-)

I think geoffw simply took you by your word. ;)

Saying "I hate you", followed by a smiley to someone you know well doesn't really count :-)
1 person has voted this message useful

Solfrid Cristin
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Message 28 of 43

09 September 2013 at 2:28pm | IP Logged

Josquin wrote:

Oderint dum metuant. ("They may hate me as long as they fear me.")

Emperor Caligula

Yep. That's me. To the letter :-)
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Josquin
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4842 days ago
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Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish
Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian

Message 29 of 43

09 September 2013 at 2:29pm | IP Logged

tarvos wrote:

Oh, hate me or love me...

Oderint dum metuant. ("They may hate me as long as they fear me.")

Emperor Caligula

EDIT: Oops, I deleted the original post in order to edit it. Now, the thread is messed up a little bit... :)

Edited by Josquin on 09 September 2013 at 2:30pm
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Solfrid Cristin
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Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
Studies: Russian

Message 30 of 43

09 September 2013 at 2:39pm | IP Logged

Josquin wrote:

tarvos wrote:

Oh, hate me or love me...

Oderint dum metuant. ("They may hate me as long as they fear me.")

Emperor Caligula

EDIT: Oops, I deleted the original post in order to edit it. Now, the thread is messed up a little bit... :)

Never mind. It just looks like I can draw faster than my own shadow (comment posts before they are even written) which is the way I like it. You know, good for my image. Which is of course incredibly important to me :-)
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Josquin
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Germany
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Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish
Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian

Message 31 of 43

09 September 2013 at 2:54pm | IP Logged

Solfrid Cristin wrote:

I'm glad I could help you polishing your image! ;)

But I would like to add some languages that also changed their alphabets:

Romanian (Cyrillic > Latin)
Mongolian (Mongolian > Latin > Cyrillic)
Turkish (Arabic > Latin)
German (Gothic > Latin)
Irish (Gaelic > Latin)

Well, the last two aren't really other alphabets, but just other fonts. Nevertheless, a lot of young Germans struggle to read books in the old Gothic font ("Fraktur"). Letters written in German cursive ("Kurrentschrift") are even harder to decipher. I think most people today wouldn't be able to read them.

So, if changing only the font already creates such problems, I can imagine that changing the entire alphabet will create even bigger problems. Most people aren't really interested in languages, so learning another alphabet - even for their own language - seems like a huge challenge, especially if the alphabets are as different as the Arabic and the Latin ones.

Edited by Josquin on 09 September 2013 at 2:55pm
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prz_
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Message 32 of 43

10 September 2013 at 3:51pm | IP Logged

Solfrid, forgive me those extremely strong words. I just have enough of all of these animosities. People fighting with each other, killing each other, hating each other, presuming in advance that EVERYONE who's [Russian, Polish, Serbian, Croatian, Azeri, Armenian, black, white, muslim, catholic, atheist...] is EVIL. I have enough of being overcareful to say something about Serbians to Croatians and something about Croatians to Serbians, etc. etc. I hate the fact that I'm afraid of going to Lithuania [well, I will anyway, but still], because some people can act badly to me because of some stupid historical events, which happened almost a century ago! I also hate monolingual or bilingual people who say that "why I have to learn any other language if there's English?" and discriminating everything what's not Anglo-Saxon [and especially UK/USA made]. Or, on the other hand, disliking it, because it's not FRENCH. And even the stupid alphabets can become problems - gosh. Sometimes I hate this world.

Edited by prz_ on 10 September 2013 at 9:58pm

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