EmmaC02 wrote:I'm currently in the process of learning a new alphabet for the first time, and thought it could be a useful thread to see what advice those who already have could provide. So, to those of you who have had success learning a new alphabet/writing system/script:
What worked for you? What didn't work? If you could offer one nugget of wisdom, what would it be?
This really depends on the size of the script you're learning.
If you want to learn a reasonably small script, like Cyrillic or Hebrew, then you can just suck it up and get it done.
Spend a day or two writing out all the letters and reciting the alphabet, using any mnemonics you'd like, and then use that script for everything going forward.
Benny Lewis has a longer article on the subject that's pretty good. I'd also recommend setting up a proper keyboard on your phone and computer as soon as possible and learning how to use it.
If you want to learn a mid-sized script, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, then things are a bit more complicated. There are about 200 important hieroglyphs for Middle Egyptian, and they fall into several categories:
- Uniliterals. This is an actual, complete alphabet for Egyptian! Or to be more precise, it's technically an abjad like Hebrew and Arabic, because you only have letters for consonants. Learn this like you would any alphabet described above.
- Biliterals and triliterals. These represent two or three consonants, and they're a bit tricky to learn, because there are maybe 60 or so that are really important, and it's hard to remember random pairs of unpronounceable gutteral consonants (OK, sure, I'm just whining). I relied heavily on Anki here, and also brute force and suffering.
- Determinatives. These are fun and easy! These are essentially little pictures like (man) or (woman) or (writing, document, abstract idea) that indicate how to interpret an ambiguous word.
So for example, consider several words spelled "sS":
sS "to write"
sS "scribe"
The
is a biliteral for the consonants "sS". The
sign is a determinative that means "writing" or "abstract idea". The
sign means "man". The two words spelled "sS" would have had different vowels (which are unwritten), but the clarifying sign allows the reader to fill it in.
After having thought about this for a while, I think the best approach is to learn to uniliteral abjad by brute force, but to learn the remaining signs as you actually encounter them in your vocabulary. The best technique I've seen for this is the
Lazy Kanjii method, which is a really, really
brainlessly easy way to review characters in Anki. How easy is it?
- You put the character on the front of the card.
- You put a brain dump of random useful information on the back of the card: the pronunciation, the meaning, whatever you want.
- When you review the card, you copy the character on paper by hand while looking at in Anki. This is ridiculously easy, but it really helps to internalize the differences between similar-looking characters.
- Before looking at the back of the card, attempt to give one meaning that's associated with the character. So in the example above, "writing" or "write" or whatever would be fine. It just needs to be in the general ballpark. If you get this anywhere close, score the card as a pass.
The goal here isn't to memorize every fact about the character using Anki. The goal is much more subtle: You're just trying to create an "anchor" in your brain for the character, consisting of two things: (1) a pretty good idea of what the character looks like, and (2) a vague idea of what the character means. The idea is that once you build this "anchor", it will be much easier to attach any other knowledge you need to the "anchor", and you can do this in the course of your regular studies.
As always, I find it nearly impossible to make SRS cards
too easy to review. I keep making them easier and easier, and yet they still work extremely well. So I don't see why anybody would want hard cards.
As for what order you should learn things in, I'm leaning towards: (1) learn things in the order you need them, and as you encounter them in your studies, but (2) learn simpler versions of signs before more complicated ones.