7 ms·
It’s a bit weird to see the English transliteration of Russian words for example, govoritz instead of говорить. For anyone looking to study Russian, I highly r
by vunderba 10mo ago
It’s a bit weird to see the English transliteration of Russian words for example, govoritz instead of говорить.
For anyone looking to study Russian, I highly recommend spending a few days familiarizing yourself with Cyrillic first. Toss it into an Anki deck (or download one) and use FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler).
It’s phonetic and consists of only 33 letters, I memorized it on a ~12-hour flight to Moscow many years ago.
- owyn 10mo agoSame thing with learning Japanese. Just memorize the symbols. It's phonetic. Of course there are complex meanings and subtleties but that's just how we all play with language. As a foreigner your pronunciation can be good once you get the basics. But you have to match the sounds with the letters. We all did it once. We can do it again.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> Same thing with learning Japanese Korean, too.
- talideon 10mo agoHangeul is at least an alphabet, in spite of appearances, and has hints as to the pronunciation built into the glyph shapes.
- BalinKing 10mo agoAdmittedly I only know (a little) Japanese and no Korean, but I get the superficial impression that kana are generally much more phonetically faithful than Hangul (namely, because of the post-WWII spelling reform that updated all the kana spellings). Like, the fact that Wiktionary gives "phonetic Hangul" for each Korean entry, to more accurately represent the actual pronunciation, makes me really suspicious of the common internet claim that Hangul is the easiest script to learn. However, Japanese also has allophony (the moraic nasal and devoicing both come to mind) and kana aren't entirely phonetic (e.g. ha/wa, he/e, ou/ō, ei/ē). I don't know enough about Korean to know if the "irregularities" are also this minor or not—can any Korean speakers/readers enlighten me?
- bugglebeetle 10mo agoAlmost nothing aside from children’s books is written exclusively in hiragana or katakana. You have to also memorize the variable readings of about 2000 kanji and many texts are nearly unintelligible without them. Pretty much everyone can memorize the former, but must struggle with the latter. Both Korean and Mandarin are simpler in this regard (and the latter follows the same grammatical order as English).
- that_ant_laney 10mo agoWhat do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard? Japanese is partially kanji, while Mandarin is 100% HanZi (kanji). But yes, grammar-wise Mandarin is definitely easier than both Japanese and Korean.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10mo agoHanzi as used in Chinese usually have exactly one reading. On the other hand, virtually all kanji in Japanese have several different pronunciations depending on context.
- xelxebar 10mo ago> What do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard? Just to add context to a sibling comment, Japan's first "writing system" was literally just Chinese. I don't mean Chinese characters, I mean that if you wanted to write something down, you had to communicate in written Chinese. Over time this written Chinese accumulated more and more transformations bringing it in alignment with spoken Japanese until we get what we see today. However, this means that, to a first approximation, modern Japanese is some amalgamation of Old Chinese and Middle Japanese. Actually, use of Chinese co-existed alongside the whole transformation process, so we actually see this funky mix of Early and Middle Japanese with Wu, Han, and Song Chinese. Character readings varied by region and time period, and so the the reading of a compound kanji term in Japanese mostly reflects the time period when that word was imported. This is why a single kanji ends up having multiple readings. Later, people began backporting individual characters onto native Japanese words, giving yet another reading. The character 行 is a particularly illustrative example: 行脚 (an-gya), 行動 (kou-dou), 行事 (gyo-ji). The first reading "an" comes from 7th century Chinsese or so, "kou" comes a bit later from the Han dynasty, and "gyo" even later from Song. Then we have the backports: 行く末 (yu-ku-sue), 行く (i-ku), 行う (okona-u). The first "yu" reading is from Middle Japanese, "i" from Modern Japanese, and "okona" from I have no clue when. That's six different readings for 行 alone! Oh, and then there are "poetic" readings that are specific to usage in people's names: 弘行 (hiro-yuki) etc. Granted, these are often quite evocative of the above readings or that of synonym characters. The historical introduction process also explains why older readings tend to be more obscure, 1) they had less time to accumulate usage, and 2) they tend to be specific to Buddhist and administrative themes. Note: The above is just what I've pieced together osmotically over the years, so I'm sure there are errors.
- vunderba 10mo agoRelated, I spent several formative years in Taiwan. Back then, my Taiwanese phone (way before smartphones) used bopomofo as the primary input method for typing Chinese, so I had to learn it. Unfortunately, some of the 注音 symbols are remarkably similar to Japanese kana, and I found that my familiarity with hiragana and katakana actually caused me constant grief, as I kept mixing up the pronunciations.
- jwrallie 10mo agoExcept there are many, many more symbols?
- ljlolel 10mo agoI found after learning Greek I could instantly read Cyrillic too
- triword 10mo agoOdd. According to this venn diagram, that would only give you 3 additional characters of Greek from what you would already know coming form English. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venn_diagram_showing_Greek,_Latin_and_Cyrillic_letters.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venn_diagram_showing...
- cynicalkane 10mo agoMany Cyrillic letters are Latin-looking, but actually have direct Greek analogues due to the history of the writing system. If you don't know Greek letters, you'd have a hard time guessing р made a 'r' sound. If you do, it's a natural guess.
- aleph_minus_one 10mo ago> If you don't know Greek letters, you'd have a hard time guessing р made a 'r' sound. If you grew up in Christian family, you know the Greek letters Χ (chi), Ρ (rho): > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_Rho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_Rho P.S. I am aware that "Windows XP" jokes that arise from this Chi Rho symbol are very easy to write ...
- ipeev 10mo agoThat diagram is rather bad at what it tries to do. Those are also historically and phonetically the same: Λ Л Δ Д Κ К The first Cyrillic alphabet was using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script , curiously created by Saint Cyril, but then people found it was too difficult, so someone in the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire mashed up Glagolitic, Greek and Latin to create the new Cyrillic (probably naming it as a sorry to Cyril for butchering his nice unique alphabet).
- Forgeties79 10mo agoTruly everyone assumes “learning another alphabet” is hard but it really isn’t. 1-2 weeks of 30-45min a day drills and you’ll have it down. Cyrillic is very easy to memorize.
- lII1lIlI11ll 10mo agoYes, a cursory glance at written Polish should be enough for anyone to understand why Latin alphabet is a poor match for Slavic languages.
- integralid 10mo agoYour are getting downvoted, but polish writing system really is not great. There are both non-english characters (ą, ę, ś, ć, ź, ż) and digraphs (rz, sz, cz, dz, dż, dź, ch). Also there is done overlap here and some sounds can be written in more than one way (h ~= ch, ż ~= rz, ć == ci, ś == si, etc). At least you can pretty much always tell how to read a word looking only at its spelling.
- talideon 10mo agoAt least some of that is the inevitable consequence of pronunciation changing over time ("rz" being the standout, which used to sound like the Czech soft-r, but lost its r-colouring) and others attempt to show an etymological relationship, which makes spelling a bit more difficult in some ways and easier in others.
- dfawcus 10mo agoRemember that English also suffers from digraphs. e.g. ch, th, sh, wr, oo; etc See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English That page lists 15 such over and above the doubled letters.
- nosianu 10mo agoOh yes, Polish, the difficulty is shown in this 1:19 slice from a movie: "Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz " -- https://youtu.be/AfKZclMWS1U https://youtu.be/AfKZclMWS1U
- Koshkin 10mo agoAlso compare the Polish 'chrząszcz' with its Cyrillic equivalent 'хрущ' (but take into account a difference in pronunciation).
- risyachka 10mo ago[flagged]
- reorder9695 10mo agoYou're honestly saying that Russia of all places has no history or culture?
- Yizahi 10mo agoShe's saying that Ruzzian history and culture doesn't deserve neither recognition nor effort to learn them, at this period of time. It's fine if a person is already partially or fully embedded in those, you can't "unlearn" stuff. But I'm personally baffled at the people on reddit book subs who are clearly westerners and writing that they are actively trying to learn Ruzzian to read some Tolstoevsky. Yeah, I'm impressed, twice, both at the spectacularly low reward/effort ratio and the sheer tone deafness of it all. In 2025. Or 2024. Or 2023. Etc.
- mlrtime 10mo agoSo because of a war they shouldn't learn Russian, and why do you type it as "Ruzzian"? The effort people put into criticizing how others spend their time is baffling, especially on HN.
- AdrianB1 10mo agoLearn Cyrillic the fun way: go in vacation in Bulgaria, they have road signs in both Latin and Cyrillic. This is how I learned Cyrillic 20 years ago, driving a lot for business all over around Balkans. It was an easy curve, a few characters at a time, with a lot of repetitions and the scenery is nice.
- __jonas 10mo agoDuolingo Russian isn't very good overall (lack of content / grammar explanations), but it does have a page for learning the alphabet that is pretty helpful.