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Learning the Latin script isn't particularly hard nor is the script itself that useful in understanding languages like English. Learning scripts, especially the

• labster 9y ago
  It's not hard to have basic knowledge of a new script with a limited number of characters. But operating with it on a daily basis is another matter. My reading speed in Japanese kana is about one-tenth of that in English (not even counting the kanji, most of which I don't know), where my Spanish reading speed is probably at least half of English. Maybe it would be higher with a more regular exposure to the character set, but it's still liable to be a difficult transition for many people.
  • wsxcde 9y ago
    Sure, going from recognizing letters to actually reading is what I meant by learning language. If you have some degree of familiarity with a language, you're no longer looking at individual letters and pattern matching them with symbols in your head. You're able to take in a word or multiple words at a time. And at least some of the English/Japanese difficulty is due to fact that you're also changing systems of writing, going from an alphabet to a pictographical system. Comparing that with English to Spanish is almost unfair because of the fact that so many English words of French and Latin origin have very similar cognates in Spanish. I'd imagine you'd have similar troubles if you tried to learn Hindi/Devanagari for instance. Devanagari is an abugida, so you'd need to learn all of the letters in the alphabet and a whole bunch of "modifications" to the consonants that denote adjoining vowels.
    • Broken_Hippo 9y ago
      But this isn't like learning a language. These folks are simply learning a new system to express their primary language. The one they are fluent in. It is more like learning how to express english using Russian letters on the page: Difficult at first, but not so bad. Sure, there will be some bumps in learning how to do things like spell and learning the rules, but it won't be that bad. Once the system is learned, it'd be more like writing difficult words by sounding them out.
      • wsxcde 9y ago
        Yeah, I totally agree. I was referring to labster's situation not, the Kazakh situation.
      • andrewshadura 9y ago
        Йэс, ит'с нот вэры диффицулт то вритэ Энглиш ин цыриллик. Муч море диффицулт то реад, И гуэсс.
    • labster 9y ago
      First of all, the vast majority of Japanese kanji are not pictographs, but ideograms. But I wasn't referring to reading that at all -- I was referring to my reading speed in just kana, which is a syllabary. Each symbol represents one syllable (mora), and there are only 48 of them in each of two sets, hiragana and katakana. That would be analogous to the number of characters to learn in two cases of a cyrillic alphabet. As for cognates, well, you'd be surprised how much English is floating around in the Japanese lexicon these days.
• mustaflex 9y ago
  As a Turk I can tell you to what extend I understand the other Turkic languages without any study: 100%: Turks from the balkans, Cyprus, Crimean tatars, Iraki and Syrian Turkmens, and Azeri turks from nothern Iran and Azerbaycan 80%: Turkmens form Turkmenistan 50%-60%:Uzbekistan(no vowel harmonization really weird :D) and Uigurs from western China 30-50%: Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan 10-30%: Turkic tribes from Siberia. Of course it is much more easy to read and understand the latin transcription of these languages.