non-roman alphabets?

[datasuspect]

anybody know/learned a language that uses different character sets than english?

did you have tremendous difficulty learning the alphabets/grammar?

i'm trying to teach myself yiddish, but i am stumped . . .

(and i have the temerity to even think i want to learn russian too).

[Rabrrrrrr]

1. Russian, Hebrew, Greek, some of the Japanese kanji

I like learning how to read in other languages (even without learning the language - certainly I have not a clue about Russian, but I can read the letters).

I'm trying to learn the Japanese phonetic "alphabet" now.

I love the look of Sanskrit and Ethiopian - would love to learn to read them some day.

[7th_Sephiroth]

3. ah yes, Kana

Hirigana and Katakana, two sets of a phonetic alphabet, loosely based on english, one for the use in "foriegn" words that regular Kanji doesent have a decent use for and i forget the purpose of the other

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. See my post #9 for an explanation of the Japanese writing system

The hiragana and katakana are NOT based on English.

The Japanese had no writing system before they encountered the Chinese somewhere around 2000 years ago. For centuries, a person had to learn Chinese in order to be literate.

However, even writing in Chinese, they still had to refer to Japanese place and personal names, so they did what the Chinese had always done with foreign words, transcribed them using characters for their sound instead of their meaning.

After a few centuries, the Japanese realized that they could use this system to write anything in their language, so by the eighth century A.D., they were writing poetry in which Chinese characters were used for their sounds instead of their meanings.

However, this was very cumbersome, so they began using shorthand forms of the characters to represent sounds. This was the beginning of the hiragana. For example, the hiragana pronounced "ah" comes from a shorthand form of a Chinese character that is pronounced "ahn."

The katakana, now used mostly to write foreign words, also come from Chinese characters. They were invented by Buddhist monks who had to recite Buddhist scriptures in Chinese as sort of a "cheat" to indicate the pronunciation.

[crispini]

2. Me! I learned Thai!

Forty four consonants based on sanskrit, and the vowels can go under, over, or around the consonant. It's a twist. But it IS a phoenetic alphabet, which beats the crap out of Chinese. Never learned much of that. I think you have to learn something like four thousand characters for basic literacy. So, ya know, it's all relative.

[7th_Sephiroth]

4. Yiddish is hard

a friend who learned it said he learned German and egyptian first

[khashka]

5. Russian in college

I used to be a champion speller and Russian destroyed that. I couldn't spell my way out of a paper bag now. Gaelic didn't help - although it uses the roman alphabet none of the letters make the sounds they're supposed to!

Right now I'm trying to learn Sanskrit. Which is only going to make things worse. Before long the only language I'll be able to speak will be gibberish. But I've been accused of that before....

Khash.

[Dogmudgeon]

8. How To Learn Languages Like Hilary Duff

I don't have any idea how Ms. Duff learns languages, or even if she knows any languages other than English, but I thought someone would respond if only out of hate for teen-pop. :P

Y'know, I haven't studied Russian in about 25 years, and my skills were mediocre at best, but I can still look at it and pronounce just about anything I see in the language, even if my comprehension is lacking or absent. But I take an entire non-logical approach to language. I try to get "the feel" of the language, see it as an art form, and listen to it as song and poetry. So to me, learning to speak the words in a language is like reciting poetry.

In the Summer of 2003, I set about learning Basque, a very strange (but pretty) language spoken in the north of Spain and the south of France. It's a non-Indo-European language, and it's grammar -- ergative -- is essentially "backwards" compared to Indo-European languages. I found it to be simultaneously exotic and familiar, and exoticism gives language study a thrill that shouldn't be overlooked.

I originally was interested in it because I had both a friend who was an ethnic Canada-born French-Basque schoolteacher was fluent in it, and a girlfriend whose family emigrated from Biarritz (also in Basque France, or Iparralde) right before WW2. But without having a Basque speaker handy at the time, I gave up after a few months.

I was surprised to find I could actually make sense of a surprisingly large amount of simple written Basque based on what I retained. It "looks right". I can't explain it much more clearly than that. I simply am stumped beyond saying, "well, it's like fuzzy logic, I think."

Nope, I've never tried learning Chinese, Japanese, or any other Asian language. I think I'd try Japanese first.

Anyway, that's the Totally Irrational Pigwidgeon Method of Language Learning and Bluffing. Make of it what you will.

Khoroshevo vsyevo and agur, lagun.

--p!

[rock]

6. Try the various shorthand systems

Pitman, Gregg, Groote, Teeline for some ingenious takes on non-roman alphabets.

[Dogmudgeon]

7. Yep

Cyrillic (Russian)
Hebrew
Greek
Shaw script
And a little bit of Gregg Shorthand.

It's easier to learn the symbols if you look at a language as a massive work of community art. Just looking at words you can't understand is often enough to kick your senses into "the groove."

The same thing applies for listening to spoken and sung languages. That's how I learned most of my French.

--p!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. When I was an undergraduate, I studied Russian

That wasn't bad at all, because once you learn the alphabet, everything is pronounced pretty much as it is spelled. (Physcially reproducing those mouthfuls of consonants can be a challenge, but you don't have any trouble figuring out what they're supposed to be.)

The grammar of Russian will give you more problems than the alphabet, which is a cinch after a couple of weeks.

Then I studied Japanese in an intensive course. We started learning with the Roman alphabet and gradually transitioned to hiragana and katakana, the two 51-member sets of syllabic symbols. However, once you learn those, everything is spelled exactly as it sounds, with the exception of about half a dozen words. The six-year-old daughter of one of our teachers could write letters to her grandparents in Japan without any help.

The kanji (Chinese characters) were a different matter. In standard writing, they represent the roots of the words, with the hiragana tacked on to represent the grammatical endings. (The katakana are used mostly for foreign words.) However, my classmates and I were the guinea pigs for a new writing textbook that used intensive and carefully recursive repetition to teach us not only how to read and write 500 kanji but also how to analyze long, complex sentences.

You'll think I'm kidding when I say that kanji get easier after the first 500, but most people who have studied Japanese with any seriousness will back me up.

I also studied Chinese, and by that time, kanji held no terror for me. My first class started us off on pinyin (China's official transcription system) and transitioned us to characters.

I took a semester of Hebrew once, but I didn't stick with it long enough to really internalize the alphabet.