How to Read in a Language With a Different Alphabet

You decide to learn Russian. Or Greek, or Korean, or Hebrew. You find a children's book, or a sign, or the back of a food packet, and you cannot read any of it. It is not only that you do not know the words yet. You cannot even tell where one letter stops and the next one starts.

That is the alphabet, and it is a much smaller job than it looks, and it is the one part of learning a language that has an end. A new alphabet is a short, closed list. Greek has 24 letters. Russian has 33. Korean's Hangul has 24 basic ones. You already read one alphabet without thinking about it, and learning a second one is a far smaller task than learning the language that uses it. Once the letters are familiar, the ordinary work of learning the language begins.

How many letters do you have to learn?

Fewer than you might think, and often fewer than the alphabet you already use:

• Greek: 24 letters, seven vowels and seventeen consonants, alpha to omega. One of them, sigma, has a second form, ς, that is used only at the end of a word.
• Russian: 33 letters. In their study of Russian spelling and learning to read, Kerek and Niemi count 21 consonant letters, 10 vowel letters, and two signs, ь and ъ, that have no sound of their own and show whether the consonant before them is soft or hard.
• Hebrew: 22 letters, all of them consonants, written from right to left. Five of them have a separate form used at the end of a word.
• Korean (Hangul): 14 basic consonant letters and 10 basic vowel letters, plus compound letters built from them, written together in syllable blocks.

Some of these letters are not even new. According to the Unicode Standard, both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets were derived from the Greek one, so a number of Greek and Cyrillic letters look like letters you know. Hangul was invented on purpose. In the 1446 book that introduced it, King Sejong explained that because ordinary people could not write their thoughts in Chinese characters, he had made 28 new letters that they could easily learn and use every day.

Which letters cause the most trouble?

The letters that look familiar. A shape you have never seen is obviously new, so you pay attention to it. A shape you know is one you will keep reading the old way. In Cyrillic, Р is an r sound, В is a v, Н is an n, and С is an s, and you will keep reading them as P, B, H and C until you have practised them on purpose. Learn those few first.

Is a new alphabet harder to read than English?

Often it is easier, once you know the letters, because the spelling is more regular.

Researchers describe writing systems by their orthographic depth. In a shallow writing system, the spelling of a word tells you how to say it. In a deep one, you often have to know the word already. In a comparison of Hebrew, English and Serbo-Croatian, Frost, Katz and Bentin concluded that in shallow orthographies, readers get the sound of a word directly from the print, while in deep ones they get it from words they already know.

English is at the deep end. Think of "cough", "though", "through" and "thought": four words with "ough", none of them pronounced alike. When Seymour, Aro and Erskine compared children learning to read in English and 12 other European writing systems, most children could read simple words accurately and fluently before the end of their first school year. English was the clearest exception: reading developed more than twice as slowly as in the shallow writing systems.

Greek, Korean and Russian are all more regular than English. Greek is regular enough that every letter or letter pair in a word can be lined up with a sound in order. Hangul is read with a one-to-one mapping between letters and sounds. Russian is the least tidy of the three. Kerek and Niemi call its spelling regular and predictable, but with a high number of exceptions. Stress can fall on any syllable, and it is marked only in dictionaries and in books for children and learners. Unstressed vowels change, so сова (owl) is pronounced "sava", and the spelling does not show that. Still, once you know the letters, you can sound out a Russian word and usually come close, which is more than English spelling offers.

What if the script leaves out the vowels?

Hebrew works differently. It is an abjad, a writing system that records the consonants. In Wasserstein and Lipka's description, the vowels can be shown with small points around the letters, but pointed text is used mainly in books for young children, in poetry and in sacred texts. Everyday Hebrew leaves the points out, and four letters do double duty as consonants and as vowels.

This changes what the alphabet does for you. Pointed Hebrew is close to one letter, one sound, and it is the version children learn to read with. Unpointed Hebrew is the deepest of the three writing systems in Frost, Katz and Bentin's comparison, and Share and Bar-On describe it as full of homographs, words that are spelled the same but read differently. Without the points, you often need to know the word to read it. So in Hebrew, learning words early matters even more than it does in Greek or Russian. Start with pointed text, and expect the move to unpointed text to be a step of its own.

How should you learn the letters?

Learn each letter as a sound, not as a picture. Reading means turning shapes into sounds, so say every letter out loud as you learn it.

Write the letters by hand. In a study by Longcamp and colleagues, adults learned new characters either by writing them with pen and paper or by typing them. The ones who had written the characters by hand were better at telling them apart from their mirror images, and the difference lasted for several weeks.

Learn a few letters at a time and come back to them on later days. A large review of studies on spaced practice by Cepeda and colleagues found that spreading study over separate sessions leads to better recall than the same study in one block.

And in Russian, treat handwriting as a separate job. Several handwritten Russian letters look quite different from their printed forms: a handwritten т looks like an m, and a handwritten д looks like a g.

Why is sounding out a new script so tiring?

Because at first, reading the letters takes all your attention. Kerek and Niemi note that children who are just learning to read Russian have their mental resources fully taken up by working through the letters one by one, which is why they struggle to work out where the stress falls. You may know the feeling: you get to the end of a line having pronounced every word and understood none of it. It is part of the same reason that reading in any new language is tiring at first.

It gets easier with practice, and the practice that helps most is reading a lot of very easy text, where the words are short and mostly known. That way you see the letters over and over without also having to work out a sentence full of new vocabulary.

Does knowing the alphabet mean you can read the language?

No. It means you can sound the language out. The Simple View of Reading, proposed by Gough and Tunmer in 1986, describes reading as the product of two separate skills: decoding, which is turning the written word into a spoken one, and language comprehension, which is understanding that word once you have it. You need both. You can decode "etymology" and have no idea what it means.

Knowing the alphabet is the decoding half. You can sound out a Russian sentence correctly and understand none of it. So once the letters are familiar, the usual work starts: words, then grammar, then more words. The difference is that the alphabet is done once, at the very beginning. After that, your time goes into the language itself.

Where should you start?

If you are looking at a new script and do not know where to begin, here is an order to follow:

1. Learn the letters as sounds, a few a day, out loud. Write them by hand.
2. Learn the look-alike letters first, the ones that resemble letters you know but stand for a different sound.
3. Learn your first words as soon as you can read the letters, so that sounding out a word gives you a meaning and not just a sound. The most common words come first, because they turn up on every page.
4. Read far below your level at the start: labels, captions, a children's book, a first book you can finish. The point is to see the letters many times, not to challenge yourself.
5. Do not look up every word. You do not have to understand everything to keep reading and keep improving.

In Simply Fluent, a free course teaches the letters of Hebrew, Russian, Greek, Ukrainian and Korean a few at a time, and English speakers learning Russian or Hebrew can also get flashcards for the 100 most common words. That is roughly the order above. But the order matters more than the tool. Any method that gets you from the letters to words quickly, and then gets you reading, will work.

Pick five letters today and say them out loud until you can read them without stopping to think. Five more tomorrow. You will be able to sound out words long before you understand them, and that is the right order.