Post AdZiHTLAlObKj3e1Tc by alice@bidule.menf.in
 (DIR) More posts by alice@bidule.menf.in
 (DIR) Post #AdZiHSEkrlsDIrdNpo by 0shame@eldritch.cafe
       2024-01-06T12:56:09Z
       
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       Learning alphabets, even those used by languages you don't plan to study further, has a surprisingly large payoff. Learning cyrillic allowed me to advance from understanding 0% of Russian text I encounter to maybe 5–10% that I can pick out as names or loanwords. That's probably the largest increase in understanding for the effort required you're ever going to get.I think next I want to learn the Hebrew alphabet. Then kana. I understand that there's two kinds: hiragana and katakana. I'm not sure which I should start with for the goal of picking out bits of Japanese text here and there.Cursive scripts intimidate me.
       
 (DIR) Post #AdZiHTLAlObKj3e1Tc by alice@bidule.menf.in
       2024-01-06T16:45:44.036835Z
       
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       @0shame You want katakana for loan words (but even then, japanese phonology distorts them quite a lot from their language of origin: for instance it took me quite a while to figure out that エアコン, "eakon" was actually… "air con'" short for air conditioning). So you probably need to develop some familiarity with the japanese accent and way to treat phonemes from languages. Hiragana are mostly used for grammatical information, or some japanese words, but then again there are exceptions depending on the time the word was borrowed. For instance たばこ, "tabako" is always written in hiragana and indeed means as you'd expect… tobacco (from the portuguese — and Camille, I don't know if you're familiar with how much portuguese got mixed into modern day japanese but if you don't you'd be amazed). So go for katakana, but once you've got the enthusiasm go for hiragana too to cover more words or understand some additional grammatical context : )
       
 (DIR) Post #AdZiP1Y7yR2cqlIye0 by 0shame@eldritch.cafe
       2024-01-06T16:46:58Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @alice This is very helpful – thanks!
       
 (DIR) Post #AdZiZGHm2WGXRvXNoW by alice@bidule.menf.in
       2024-01-06T16:48:59.001523Z
       
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       @0shame どういたしまして : ) (all hiragana, sorry I'm not helping 😉)