Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
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.