Thread: Seriousness Learning a new language
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Old 06-28-2009, 03:45 AM   #71
HarryT
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami View Post
Yes, [alphabets] undeniably makes a huge difference. For example, my kids had some trouble learning the Latin alphabet, which they had never seen before, and I constantly have to explain to my Chinese teaching friends that their students are going to need a lot more time to get familiar with writing in characters than their students back in China or Taiwan, who grew up seeing these symbols around them all the time.
For alphabetic languages - ie languages which use the Roman, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, etc - alphabets, it really is not a problem for most adult learners.

I am a moderator of the Latin and ancient Greek forums of an on-line adult-education "distance learning" establishment here in the UK. The one thing that EVERYBODY worries about when they are starting to learn Greek is "how will I cope with that funny alphabet?". The thing that almost everybody finds is that within literally a few days of starting to learn the language, they no longer even notice the alphabet. Learning new alphabets really is not a problem for the overwhelming majority of people. It "looks" scary, but it isn't.

I found the Arabic alphabet a slight challenge when I started to learn it, because each letter has four different "shapes" depending where it occurs in a word, but even that, after a week or so, is not a problem.

Alphabets are just "shapes". Really, most people are perfectly capable of learning new ones very easily.
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