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When to learn alternative alphabets | ||
Tags: Alphabets | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4477 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes  Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 10 of 13 27 April 2014 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | ||
Focusing on spoken language in diglossic languages (like Tamil) or languages with complex social registers and spelling (like Khmer). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4392 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 11 of 13 28 April 2014 at 12:11pm | IP Logged | ||
Perhaps in the case of Serbian and Croatian? I am taking the approach of studying Croatian first (learning unfamiliar words in a familiar alphabet) and then trying to convert this to a knowledge of Serbian (reading mostly-familiar words in an unfamiliar alphabet). I think it has been more efficient for me to learn new vocabulary in the Latin alphabet first and worry about increasing my Cyrillic reading speed later. In most other circumstances though I agree that learning the alphabet is the best place to start! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Elanguest Newbie Malta elanguest.com Joined 3675 days ago 19 posts - 26 votes Speaks: English* | Message 12 of 13 29 April 2014 at 11:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Since most languages have specific phonetic differences to whatever your native language may be, it can actually
save confusion if you learn the new alphabet. If you use a transliteration, those sounds will be represented by a cumbersome group of letters or an IPA symbol that will only be useful as a transition (unless you are doing a linguistic study or writing a linguistic paper). It's kind of an unnecessary step. It's true that learning alphabets is usually quick work, but even where it isn't (as in Devanagari), I would still suggest doing it because ultimately it will save you time in both language learning and cultural integration. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6512 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 13 29 April 2014 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can't see any reason to delay learning a writing system of a language (except maybe if you find yourself in a jungle, surrounded by hungry native speakers of a language without a writing system). However there are at least one case where I would use a phonetic trancription system to learn a spoken language in parallel with learning its writing system, and this case is Chinese. And there are cases where it is nice to have editions of texts where things like vowels and accents are indicated, even if these aren't used in normal writing. But for me it wouldn't be relevant to even attempt to learn a language if I couldn't read the letters and hear a voice reciting the words somewhere in the space between my ears.
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