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> The Cyrillic alphabet is a major barrier to learning Russian for Americans. It may be a barrier, sure, but it is a microscopic barrier (33 letters, mostly Gr

> The Cyrillic alphabet is a major barrier to learning Russian for Americans. It may be a barrier, sure, but it is a microscopic barrier (33 letters, mostly Greek-based, many in common with the Latin alphabet) compared to the complexity of a language (any language) itself. Would you say that Americans would more readily pick up Danish? Or Finnish? Or Latvian? Or Polish? Just as a side note: I once had to take a course in classical Greek. It took us one lesson (or maybe two) to learn the Greek alphabet. Compared to the rest of the course it was... I am finding it hard even to say 'peanuts', for it would be an offense to peanuts. (I am more inclined to think that it's up to us to standardize on an international language — and I would much rather it were English — than for different nations to learn each other's languages. But that's, of course, just my opinion.)

kbenson 9y ago
> Would you say that Americans would more readily pick up Danish? Or Finnish? Or Latvian? Or Polish? I would say that Americans (and people in general) are more likely to attempt taking up those languages, if given a fairly equal choice between them and others that also require learning a new alphabet. For the same reason (although on a lesser scale) that they might shy away from Chinese or Japanese. It's one more hurdle.
- kwoff 9y ago
  In terms of hurdles, of those four I think Danish is a clear winner there. Finnish is "ah, hell no" as far I know. :) In terms of usefulness, I'm not sure - maybe Polish. (That seems quite complicated grammatically, like other Slavic languages.) Chinese, if you don't care about writing it, is simple grammatically (though a few concepts are hard to wrap your head around).
  - _delirium 9y ago
    Danish is "ah, hell no" if you want to try speaking it out loud...
- Fins 9y ago
  Are you saying that "people in general" == "people whose native alphabet is Latin-based"?
  - kbenson 9y ago
    Eh, sort of. I kind of got mixed up between the point of saying "I think people in general are more likely to attempt a language with less obvious initial hurdles given a relatively equal set of benefits from learning them (to their understanding)" and a statement about those languages in particular that follows along those lines. So, for your proposed equivalence, I think my original statement is true, and I also think the more general statement above is likely true in a wider sense.
    - Fins 9y ago
      Apart from relative usefulness of different languages (Latin script based Kazakh would probably be considered less generally useful than Chinese, say). Initial attempt maybe. But I think very soon most people will find out that if you are coming from an Indo-European background, Kazakh or Finnish, regardless of script used, is far more foreign than Russian or German.
      - kbenson 9y ago
        Sure, but the catch-22 is that most people won't have a good idea how to assess the difficulty of learning a language until they've tried, and it seems different people have different difficulties with the process. From the outside at the beginning, the different alphabet seems like quite a big deal. Thats how it feels to me at least when I think about learning another language. It's a data point of one, but I don't think I'm that unique in this.
        Fins 9y ago
        I'm not sure if most people start learning languages just because they seem "easy" either. There has to be some reason. And once you do start, something like differences between analytic and synthetic languages probably would be more of a tripping point.
kwoff 9y ago
I think the Cyrillic alphabet has enough overlapping letters with the Latin alphabet, that it's relatively easy to learn the other. Possibly the Greek alphabet even overlaps better with Cyrillic than Latin? Try Arabic, though. I took a relatively intensive four-week Arabic class one summer, and we spent the first week or two on the alphabet. Anecdote: when I was little (in the USA), our family had a big dictionary, and in the back was, among others, the Cyrillic alphabet along with how to pronounce the letters. I would write out English words in Cyrillic letters, thinking that I was writing Russian words. :)

kbenson 9y ago

> Would you say that Americans would more readily pick up Danish? Or Finnish? Or Latvian? Or Polish? I would say that Americans (and people in general) are more likely to attempt taking up those languages, if given a fairly equal choice between them and others that also require learning a new alphabet. For the same reason (although on a lesser scale) that they might shy away from Chinese or Japanese. It's one more hurdle.

kwoff 9y ago
In terms of hurdles, of those four I think Danish is a clear winner there. Finnish is "ah, hell no" as far I know. :) In terms of usefulness, I'm not sure - maybe Polish. (That seems quite complicated grammatically, like other Slavic languages.) Chinese, if you don't care about writing it, is simple grammatically (though a few concepts are hard to wrap your head around).
- _delirium 9y ago
  Danish is "ah, hell no" if you want to try speaking it out loud...
Fins 9y ago
Are you saying that "people in general" == "people whose native alphabet is Latin-based"?
- kbenson 9y ago
  Eh, sort of. I kind of got mixed up between the point of saying "I think people in general are more likely to attempt a language with less obvious initial hurdles given a relatively equal set of benefits from learning them (to their understanding)" and a statement about those languages in particular that follows along those lines. So, for your proposed equivalence, I think my original statement is true, and I also think the more general statement above is likely true in a wider sense.
  - Fins 9y ago
    Apart from relative usefulness of different languages (Latin script based Kazakh would probably be considered less generally useful than Chinese, say). Initial attempt maybe. But I think very soon most people will find out that if you are coming from an Indo-European background, Kazakh or Finnish, regardless of script used, is far more foreign than Russian or German.
    - kbenson 9y ago
      Sure, but the catch-22 is that most people won't have a good idea how to assess the difficulty of learning a language until they've tried, and it seems different people have different difficulties with the process. From the outside at the beginning, the different alphabet seems like quite a big deal. Thats how it feels to me at least when I think about learning another language. It's a data point of one, but I don't think I'm that unique in this.
      - Fins 9y ago
        I'm not sure if most people start learning languages just because they seem "easy" either. There has to be some reason. And once you do start, something like differences between analytic and synthetic languages probably would be more of a tripping point.

kwoff 9y ago

I think the Cyrillic alphabet has enough overlapping letters with the Latin alphabet, that it's relatively easy to learn the other. Possibly the Greek alphabet even overlaps better with Cyrillic than Latin? Try Arabic, though. I took a relatively intensive four-week Arabic class one summer, and we spent the first week or two on the alphabet. Anecdote: when I was little (in the USA), our family had a big dictionary, and in the back was, among others, the Cyrillic alphabet along with how to pronounce the letters. I would write out English words in Cyrillic letters, thinking that I was writing Russian words. :)