What other languages have easy to learn written forms?

May 28, 2013 1:39 PM

What are some languages that are easy to learn to read/write without actually knowing the language? Obviously to an English speaker French and Spanish would be easy to read and write because we mostly use the same alphabet, so I'd like to stay away from languages that use that system.

On a really boring afternoon at work I learned how to phonetically read and write Korean using Hangul. I have almost no knowledge of the Korean language... I'm pretty sure the only words I know are kimchee and saranghae but learning the symbols and their related sounds was incredibly easy.

I thought I might have a gift for learning to read/write languages so the following week I dove into Thai.
Yeah, ... no.
Large amount of characters, many with similar sounds, some "retired", tiny little flourishes that barely differentiate some characters from others, vowels that can remove characters or add flourishes to the beginning or end of words, etc.
Very reminiscent of how convoluted English is.

So, I'm looking for other easy languages to read/write and not understand.
Like I mentioned earlier, languages like French and Spanish are out because I can read/write those for the most part with the alphabet I already know.
I'm also not interested in "languages" like Pig Latin or things like Morse Code or Braille.

posted by simplethings to Writing & Language (29 answers total)

I was going to say Korean! I have heard (HEARD, mind you, this is not something I've actually looked into myself) that Arabic is similar to Korean in that the alphabet is relatively easy to learn to read/write.
posted by phunniemee at 1:45 PM on May 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Georgian and Armenian both have straightforward (and quite lovely in my opinion) alphabets that shouldn't be hard to learn.
posted by languagehat at 1:45 PM on May 28, 2013 [2 favorites]

> I have heard (HEARD, mind you, this is not something I've actually looked into myself) that Arabic is similar to Korean in that the alphabet is relatively easy to learn to read/write.

No, this is not at all true.
posted by languagehat at 1:45 PM on May 28, 2013 [3 favorites]

Best answer: The two Japanese alphabets, hiragana and katakana, are straightforward to learn and pronounce. Kanji is another story.
posted by zanni at 1:46 PM on May 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Russian. Knowing the Cyrillic alphabet is very satisfying. You will discover that many words (especially modern nouns) are basically the same as English.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 1:47 PM on May 28, 2013 [7 favorites]

What qxntpqbbbqxl said.
posted by greta simone at 1:49 PM on May 28, 2013

The Hebrew alphabet is pretty straight forward, and so relatively easy to learn. And it's very pretty to look at while you're learning.
posted by blurker at 1:56 PM on May 28, 2013

No, this is not at all true.

Really? I studied Arabic for a few years and the alphabet was incredibly easy to learn. There are only a handful more letters than English, and while they do look different depending on whether they are at the beginning or middle of a sentence, it's not really more complicated than the capital/lowercase letter differences in English (or heck, cursive). The sounds are odd, though, so that might negate the "reading" portion of your question.

It's been eight years since my classes though, and I can still read Arabic, Farsi or Urdu if you handed me some words on a paper. Tell you what they meant, heck no, but read it aloud, sure.

However the GRAMMAR is insanity. You do not want to read and write actual sentences in Arabic unless you enjoy memorizing twelve different verb tenses (I do enjoy this, but I understand I'm an anomaly, and I majored in linguistics so there's also that).
posted by celtalitha at 1:57 PM on May 28, 2013 [2 favorites]

As far as ease of learning goes, the Greek alphabet is one of the easiest to learn for English speakers, as it has a lot of similarities to the Latin alphabet (plus, a lot of its characters are used in maths etc.)
posted by littlegreen at 1:59 PM on May 28, 2013

The Cyrillic alphabet isn't too hard to learn to read. There's a Russian bath house I go to sometimes which signage printed in both English and Russian side by side. Sometimes I like to sit in the jacuzzi and teach myself Cyrillic and Russian via context clues. Sort of like really easy relaxing codebreaking.
posted by Sara C. at 2:03 PM on May 28, 2013

Greek?
posted by jquinby at 2:06 PM on May 28, 2013

I don't understand the question. Are you looking for languages with alphabetic writing where the spelling closely matches pronunciation (a shallow orthography)? That applies to more languages than it doesn't. Think of all the languages that have only been written since relatively recent times, like the various small languages of Africa or the Pacific that are spelled phonetically using the English alphabet. Older alphabets accumulate cruft, so while modern Greek may use the same alphabet as classical Greek, many of the pronunciations have diverged. For example, β is no longer b as in boy in Greek.

If I had to name one, I'd suggest the writing system of Amharic. On one hand, it's syllabic. On the other hand, it's straightforward enough that I managed to identify specific single words when I needed to for a past job.
posted by Nomyte at 2:14 PM on May 28, 2013

Really? I studied Arabic for a few years and the alphabet was incredibly easy to learn.

Agreed. One could learn it over the course of a weekend.

The two Japanese alphabets

ObPendant: hiragana and katakana are syllabaries, representing moras. (one reason why English haiku don't really work)

To the OP's question, Omniglot provides a very nice catalog of writing systems
posted by Tanizaki at 2:17 PM on May 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

The Hebrew alphabet is pretty straight forward, and so relatively easy to learn. And it's very pretty to look at while you're learning.

Keeping in mind that I don't read either, Yiddish might be a bit easier than Hebrew because it's more enthusiastic about vowels. But my best friend going 'I have no idea what this word is, nor how to say it' when learning Yiddish almost always meant a loan word from Hebrew.

My guess is that, in general, syllabic writing systems are easier because there's less ambiguity, but I'm totally speculating here.
posted by hoyland at 2:20 PM on May 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Your question is getting the same answers as though you asked, "what are some other alphabets?" Because the Roman alphabet that we use is more or less the same system in use for not just French and Spanish, but also Greek and Russian, and many other languages. The letter shapes for the latter two are often rather different to our own, but the principle behind how they work is basically the same. It can be very interesting to learn different alphabets, but you're still looking at the same system again and again and again. If that's what you want just go to Wikipedia and look through "List of alphabets" and find one you like the look of. Some are stunningly beautiful, such as Georgian which has already been mentioned.

However, you said that you enjoyed learning Hangul, which is somewhat alphabetic but has some syllabic features: characters stand for individual sounds but are grouped into syllables. Sadly (well, wonderfully) it is more or less unique and there's nothing exactly like it. If you're looking for alphabets with a "twist", maybe look into Shavian which is an invented script for English; Mongolian which is vertically written and has different forms for where the letter comes; or Ogham which is very unlike any alphabet you've ever seen.

Writing systems I don't recommend: abjads (like Hebrew or Arabic where some vowels are not written) as they're often dependent on some basic knowledge of the language, or abugidas (where vowels are written as "modifiers" to the consonants) because you already said you didn't enjoy Thai.

(Of course, if you want to spend time learning an alphabet, I can strongly recommend the International Phonetic Alphabet. It's very useful!)
posted by Jehan at 2:30 PM on May 28, 2013 [3 favorites]

The arabic alphabet is easy to learn, the hebrew one is harder because of the niqqud (dots).
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:31 PM on May 28, 2013

You might find it satisfying (and useful!) to learn shorthand, which is essentially a different writing system for English. You get all the satisfaction of learning a new and cool alphabet, but writing English words, so you know what they say.

I learned Teeline as a journalism student and have always found it really enjoyable to use. You start by learning the individual letters of the alphabet, and then learn different ways of stringing the letters together to make combinations and then words. As time goes on, your personal shorthand gradually evolves with use to have its own unique symbols.

It does take a lot of practice to get up to useful speeds (around 100wpm) but it's a great skill to have - fun, satisfying, useful and just a little bit mysterious.
posted by penguin pie at 2:38 PM on May 28, 2013

I just want to add to the comments on Russian that most Cyrillic letters are pronounced the same way all the time. So, if you learn the Cyrillic alphabet, you can read and pronounce most things, but may have no idea what you're saying.
posted by JannaK at 3:01 PM on May 28, 2013

I have realized this week that I have picked up a surprising amount of Cyrillic familiarity by just playing a bunch of GeoGuessr. (My friends and I play with Google allowed, of course, less useful otherwise.)
posted by Sequence at 3:02 PM on May 28, 2013

I think many people could learn to read Hebrew in an afternoon. It also gives you a nice challenge that's not frustratingly hard, since a few letters change shape depending on whether or not they are the last letter of the word, handwritten Hebrew looks really different than printed Hebrew, and, of course, much of the time, there will be no vowels.

The vowel thing isn't even that hard IMO though, since there are letters that are kind of like vowel placeholders. For example, the letter yod (י) represents "y" or "i" sounds. Here is the Hebrew for Yitzhak Rabin (the letters go right to left, so you see the first yod for Yitzhak all the way to the far right of the word on the right) : יצחק רבין

From right to left, for each of those four letters in his first name, in English the equivalents would go roughly:
- "yi,"
- "tz," (a sound we don't have a letter for in English even though we use it),
- "ch" (another one we don't have in English and DON'T use, kind of a throat clearing sound, click here to hear it pronounced natively.)
- "k"

Then you also see the yod in his last name too, the word on the left, used as more of an "i" sound. From right to left, in English, the letters would be:

- "r" (This one was one of the easiest to remember for me because it looks like a backwards r.)
- "b" (This letter can be a b or a v sound.)
- "ee" (Here's the yod again.)
- "n" This letter, "nun" is one of the letters that changes shape if it's the last letter of the word. Final nun looks like what you see at the end of "Rabin": "ן". Regular nun, which you will find in other positions in a word, looks like this: נ.
posted by cairdeas at 3:04 PM on May 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

No, this is not at all true.

I studied Arabic in the military and am now a military interpreter. On our course we were expected (and rightly so) to spend no more than two days learning the alphabet. There are 28 letters and four forms, and not all of the letters even take all forms. At maximum there could be 112 letters but there are actually less, and the forms all look similar. The 28 letters can be mastered in a day.
posted by mani at 3:05 PM on May 28, 2013 [2 favorites]

Also, as an example of the challenge printed vs. written Hebrew gives you, this t-shirt has "Shabbat Shalom" printed on it in a stylized "handwriting" font. Here's how Shabbat Shalom looks printed: שבת שלום. Pretty different, at least to me...
posted by cairdeas at 3:20 PM on May 28, 2013

I'm studying Hebrew, and I'm finding it pretty difficult. The alphabet itself is very easy to learn, but since most printed Hebrew doesn't have vowels, it's sort of impossible to even sound out words unless you know the vocabulary and/or understand common patterns. The Yitzhak Rabin example above is easy partly because of it's got yods but also partly because I know who that is - give me a unfamiliar word (and I'm sort of hitting a wall with memorizing vocab right now) and I'm totally screwed. My vote is for Russian.
posted by naoko at 4:25 PM on May 28, 2013

Not to spam about Hebrew in case you are not that interested in it, OP. But here's a tip about the vowels. Just like if a word has an "i" vowel sound in it you will almost always have a yod there, if the word has an "o" or "u" sound in it you will have a vav. (This is a vav: ו A vav can also represent a "v" sound).

So you can actually get close to sounding out unfamiliar words this way. If there is no yod and no vav, a lot of the time that means if there is a vowel in between two consonants it must be an A or an E kind of sound.

Here's an example: ירושלים

Say you don't know this word and you wanted to try to read it. You could get most of the way there just by sounding it out.

- First letter is your yod, so that's a Y sound.
- Next letter R
- Then you have a vav.

So if I didn't know the word and were sounding it out, I would guess up to this point it sounded something like Yiro or Yiru

- Fourth letter is a consonant that can be an "s" or "sh" sound.
- Fifth letter is an L sound.
- Another yod.
- Mem in its "final mem" form, making an M sound.

So if I were guessing, I would guess this part sounded something like "salim." All together I would guess "Yirosalim" or something like that.

The word is actually Yerushaliyim, the Hebrew name for Jerusalem. But if you can sound it out close enough you get these moments where you can go "Yirosalim, yirosalim, what could that be... oh duh, it's Yerushaliyim."

My two cents.
posted by cairdeas at 4:44 PM on May 28, 2013

> Really? I studied Arabic for a few years and the alphabet was incredibly easy to learn.

For all you people who are saying variants on this: yes, of course there are only a couple dozen symbols and they're relatively easy to memorize, if all you care about is knowing the writing system with no connection to the actual language. But the poster talks about "learning the symbols and their related sounds" (emphasis added), and the relation between sound and writing in Arabic is not at all simple. I've tried it and had considerable difficulty, and I'm no slouch at languages.
posted by languagehat at 4:59 PM on May 28, 2013 [4 favorites]

The arabic alphabet is easy to learn, the hebrew one is harder because of the niqqud (dots).

In my experience, Arabic and Hebrew have very very similar relationships to niqqud -- long vowels are letters, short vowels are for children, the occasional foreign word, and religious texts. Hebrew has fewer irregular forms, but written Arabic is consistant, whereas handwritten Hebrew is practically a separate alphabet. Arabic has more sounds/letters that are difficult and unfamiliar to an English speaking ear. While many of these sounds originally existed in Hebrew as well, and the corresponding letters still exist, they have been all but assimilated in non Judeo-Arabic (Mizrachi) accents.

Either one would be a healthy challenge, highly useful, and a lot of fun.

Hoyland is right that Yiddish has more vowels, and might therefore be a tad easier. It is also true that the loshen koydesh (words originating from Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic) will through anyone not competent in those languages for a loop.
posted by femmegrrr at 8:05 PM on May 28, 2013 [2 favorites]

vietnamese (thanks(?) french colonialism). they use roman letters (the kind you're reading now) but there are additional accents it can still be a hard language to speak well, but only in term of reading and writing can be easy for an english speaker.
posted by cupcake1337 at 11:51 PM on May 28, 2013

Really? I studied Arabic for a few years and the alphabet was incredibly easy to learn.

Sure, as far as that goes, but you won't be able to pronounce an Arabic word that you can read but don't actually know.

It sounds like you're looking for languages with phonetic writing systems that:
-Capture how to pronounce most written words
-Don't have too many phonemes that are difficult for native English speakers to produce.

Arabic doesn't meet either of these qualifications. How about Russian? There are sounds that you won't be able to pronounce correctly right away but it'd be much easier than Arabic.
posted by atrazine at 1:01 AM on May 29, 2013

How about Cherokee? It looks like an interesting alphabet and the language needs more users. I don't know how easy it is to learn, though.

Russian is a good alternative. It took a few weeks for me to learn all the letters.

I like the idea of Greek because I had a fun time decoding it on a manual the other day.
posted by dragonplayer at 11:48 AM on May 29, 2013