Non-Latin alphabets

How hard is it to learn languages that don't use the Latin alphabet? (Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, etc) It seems that they'd be harder, not only because of an unfamiliar alphabet, but also because those languages have less in common otherwise.

The Cyrillic alphabet is really easy to use. I'm speaking in particular to Macedonian and Serbian. The reason why it is easy is because such languages have only one sound per letter (unlike English). I think initially it would be overwhelming to those who aren't exposed to the alphabet but after learning each letter, it is very very easy to use.

The Korean alphabet "Hangeul" [haNg1l], is amazingly ingenious, and is very easy to learn, because it phonetically represents Korean very well (at a phonemic level). In terms of grammatical difficulty, Korean is probably about as difficult as Japanese is for English speakers, but the fact that its writing is so much simpler is a major advantage. In my introductory Korean class we learned the alphabet and had basically mastered it by the 2nd or 3rd day of class.

What Kirk said. I was there too.

If you take about 2 hours with a speaker of Korean, you could probably learn how to read hangul in that time. Then after that you would be able to read it, and then just learn the grammar and lexicon.

The Mandarin "alphabet" is annoying. Pingying romanizes Chinese, but there is one that is phonetic. It is hard to learn because you have to learn the "word" from that alphabet, then you need to learn the character for it.

Well, as far as the alphabets are concerned (only the letters, not speaking about the languages), I think that Latin, Cyrillic and Greek are equally easy. Arabic and Chinese seem to be much more difficult.

<<Arabic and Chinese seem to be much more difficult.>>

I would think Arabic would be easier to learn to write than Chinese because it is phonetically based.

Arabic is slightly more difficult to learn to write than languages that use the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets because of having to learn different forms of certain letters, i.e., depending on their location in a word. But that's a very minor increase in difficulty. What's difficult is trying to read Arabic as it's generally written (without the diacritics that indicate vowels) when you don't know the vocabulary yet. You can't figure out how to pronounce the word when you don't know the vowels. That's why the kids in Arabic countries continue to have the diacritics included in their textbooks for a certain number of years (I forget how many).

It's like reading speedwriting in English -- you have to know what the words are already, to know how to fill in the vowels.

"I would think Arabic would be easier to learn to write than Chinese because it is phonetically based."

I agree. I didn't say they were equally easy, I just said they are both much more difficult than the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek.

learning alphabets/writing systems haven't been very difficult to me...except chinese, because you have to know the english meanong of the word, the pronunciation of the word and the character itself (plus the order of writing the strokes). Hebrew alphabet I learnt in two days (same with greek,cyrillic and korean) but japanese kana's and devanagari (hindi) took some more time.. as well as arabic.
When I start learning some alphabet, I just take it in front of me and start writing my own language with it.. that's a good way of memorising the letters...