Learning a new writing system (as a beginner)

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Iversen
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Re: Learning a new writing system (as a beginner)

Postby Iversen » Wed Dec 07, 2022 9:03 am

I recently revived my Georgian writing skills simply by copying and transcribing a few pages from the internet. I knew that Google Translate will provide a transcription below if you copy some something in a funny alphabet to the left box, and that transcription happened to concur with the Georgian alphabet I had copied from somewhere on the internet so that I could use it for reference (and as a control). However I first learned the alphabet in 2000 where I visited Georgia and promptly forgot it again, and this time I'm likely to forget it again since I don't know the language behind the decorative signs. By the way, Kartuli ((ქართული ენა) has got two other alphabets, but you only see those on the walls of old churches.

When I learned the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets in the 70s the internet wasn't invented yet so there I just learned those alphabets - but not the languages - by transcribing page after page by hand. However when I then returned to language learning in this milennium I remembered most of the Greek alphabet because it also is used in science, and the Russian alphabet returned fairly quickly by transcribing a few pages. The funny thing is that for a time I had a tendency to mix Greek letters into my Cyrillic and inversely so I had to study them on an alternate basis, but I'm luckily past that stage now.

Besides I learned the Korean hangul from a book called something like "yes you can learn Korean in 49 minutes", but it took at least an hour :lol: - and now I have forgotten it again because I didn't learn the language too.
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Re: Learning a new writing system (as a beginner)

Postby Erisnimi » Wed Dec 07, 2022 9:38 am

Monk wrote:
Erisnimi wrote:Based on my own studies, I'd recommend this: pay attention to words from the very beginning just as much as on the characters themselves. It's easy to memorize the characters but because characters don't immediately give away the correct pronunciation (as they pretty much do in Spanish), it's useful to start connecting words and (correct) sounds from the get-go. http://www.pealim.com, http://www.wiktionary.org and http://www.forvo.com are all good resources, I find.


Thank you for the resources, Erisnimi. I've bookmarked them for future use. What you say about paying attention to words and pronunciation from the beginning makes logical sense. I'll definitely take that into consideration. I don't anticipate it will take me too long to memorize the individual letters. I am planning on memorizing both print and script. After I have those down, I will likely move on to writing individual words and then short sentences for writing practice. But as you (and others) have mentioned, learning correct pronunciation early on makes good sense to me.

What you say about pattern recognition is helpful as well. It's true, like you say, even with English. We don't read letter-by-letter. For example, "cat" is "cat," not "c - a - t."


Not to get too deep into Hebrew spelling, since you're only beginning your journey but it's easy to get confused by it if you only look at the characters. Why are lecha and lach ("to you", masculine and feminine) spelt the same way, לך? I don't know but I've gotten used to it. Why is "now" spelt עכשיו and not אחשב? Again...

Pattern recognition is especially useful in Hebrew because you can actually make very good guesses as to the meaning of new words if you know their function (what purpose they serve in a sentence) and are familiar with any word they are related with - which you do by spotting root characters. And you can recognize functions if you spot familiar patterns. It is a pattern-heavy language, which has helped revive the language in modern use and still make it feel faithful to the origins of Hebrew.
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Re: Learning a new writing system (as a beginner)

Postby verdastelo » Wed Dec 07, 2022 1:00 pm

A strategy that I use is to turn learning into a game. Imagine that you are an archeologist from the fourth millennium who has found a map in an ancient language and whose goal is to decipher it. Now, find a map of Israel or the world in Hebrew and try to decipher as many countries as you can. Consult a cheatsheet when you get stuck.

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Right now I'm learning the Kananda script and my game is to decipher book names. Because Kannada and Hindi share a lot of common vocabulary through Sanskrit, this strategy works for me. For you, reading country names or capital names can be a more productive exercise.

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Re: Learning a new writing system (as a beginner)

Postby Sae » Thu Dec 08, 2022 12:01 pm

Monk wrote:
Sae wrote:For example, practicing different verb forms on new verbs also means I'm using a lot of repetition, like here:


Thank you, Sae. I think for me I want to learn the letters first (print and script), and then move on to writing words and phrases. I love getting a glimpse of people's language notebooks. I use computerized resources for some things, but I am also a fan of pen and paper. I know next to nothing about Cyrillic, but I like your handwriting! :D


No worries & thanks, my handwriting is usually a mess but I think I am taking more care with Cyrillic lol

One of the things I guess I regret in my Vietnamese learning is that I didn't do pen & paper sooner, most of my notes are messily plastered around on my computer. I think it's easier to type something and forget it, but I dunno, I feel doing it by hand helps commit stuff to memory better. And writing Vietnamese is one of my weaknesses, because I can't always remember how words are spelled when I want to write them, so I end up looking them up. But hey, we learn to learn, so I've been trying a lot more pen & paper stuff with Mongolian and committing those habits to Vietnamese.
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Re: Learning a new writing system (as a beginner)

Postby Sprachprofi » Thu Dec 08, 2022 12:23 pm

I did a presentation at the Polyglot Conference on how to learn any foreign script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqZhz6n-9rg

I generally don't recommend copying pages upon pages of letters because these only commit the letters to muscle memory, the same memory used for entering your PIN at an ATM. And just as with PINs, if you've been on vacation for a while and try to remember again, your muscles will have forgotten. So if that's your memorisation strategy, you have to commit to handwriting regularly - something I'm not prepared to do, given that I like many languages with foreign writing systems and I also rarely have reason to write anything by hand in them, mainly using the computer. So for me, memorising the letters using the same part of the brain I also use for vocabulary, and not muscle memory, is the better strategy.
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Re: Learning a new writing system (as a beginner)

Postby Sae » Thu Dec 08, 2022 8:57 pm

Sprachprofi wrote:I did a presentation at the Polyglot Conference on how to learn any foreign script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqZhz6n-9rg

I generally don't recommend copying pages upon pages of letters because these only commit the letters to muscle memory, the same memory used for entering your PIN at an ATM. And just as with PINs, if you've been on vacation for a while and try to remember again, your muscles will have forgotten. So if that's your memorisation strategy, you have to commit to handwriting regularly - something I'm not prepared to do, given that I like many languages with foreign writing systems and I also rarely have reason to write anything by hand in them, mainly using the computer. So for me, memorising the letters using the same part of the brain I also use for vocabulary, and not muscle memory, is the better strategy.


I watched through it and some interesting and good advice. I'll see what I can take on board, thanks for posting.
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Re: Learning a new writing system (as a beginner)

Postby Monk » Fri Dec 09, 2022 9:19 pm

Sprachprofi wrote:I did a presentation at the Polyglot Conference on how to learn any foreign script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqZhz6n-9rg.


Thank you for sharing the link. I enjoyed watching your presentation.

Sprachprofi wrote:I generally don't recommend copying pages upon pages of letters because these only commit the letters to muscle memory, the same memory used for entering your PIN at an ATM. And just as with PINs, if you've been on vacation for a while and try to remember again, your muscles will have forgotten. So if that's your memorisation strategy, you have to commit to handwriting regularly - something I'm not prepared to do, given that I like many languages with foreign writing systems and I also rarely have reason to write anything by hand in them, mainly using the computer. So for me, memorising the letters using the same part of the brain I also use for vocabulary, and not muscle memory, is the better strategy.


This has given me some things to think about. I will likely experiment with different methods. I don't have the data to back it up (though now I'm interested in reading studies about handwriting vs. typing in regards to memory), but as a layperson, when I think about it, it seems to me that there is something else going on when I physically write characters on a page versus touching a key on a keyboard that represents that character. The best way I can describe it is that handwriting is more intimate. I'm not only learning to recognize the character by sight, but I'm also learning how to generate that character stroke-by-stroke. It (subjectively) feels like the act of handwriting encodes the information in my brain more strongly than typing or viewing a flashcard.

Can you point me to sources that support what you share above about handwriting only committing the letters to muscle memory? I am genuinely interested. In fact, I plan on picking up a copy of your book Hebrew Script Hacking to experiment with the approach you talked about in the presentation.

I can definitely see how handwriting might be problematic for language learners that are working with a host of different scripts/writing systems. Trying to maintain them all seems like it would be a big challenge! For me, since Spanish uses the Latin script like my native English, Hebrew is the only language I'm learning (at present) that has a different script. I have other languages on my wish list though that have different scripts/writing systems. So that might become an issue later on.
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