Lingua
A page of Japanese, Korean or Russian looks, to someone who reads only Latin letters, like the reason not to start. It is the opposite: the script is the one part of the language with a small, fixed number of pieces, a definite end, and a payoff that arrives in days. Two weeks of short daily sessions is usually enough to read any of these systems slowly. Everything after that is vocabulary, which is the same work in every language.
Four scripts, four different jobs
Cyrillic (Russian). An alphabet of 33 letters, most of which map one to one onto sounds. About a third look like Latin letters and sound the same, a third look familiar and sound different, and a third are new. The difficulty is not the letters but the false friends: a Russian В is a v, an Н is an n, a Р is an r. Learn those first and the rest is reading practice.
Hangul (Korean). Not really an alphabet you memorise so much as a system you understand. Fourteen basic consonants and ten vowels, designed in the fifteenth century so that the shapes reflect the mouth positions, are stacked into square syllable blocks. Most learners can sound out words after a few hours; the blocks make Korean the fastest script here to start reading.
Hiragana and katakana (Japanese). Two syllabaries of 46 basic characters each, one for native words and grammar, one for foreign words and emphasis. Each character is a syllable, so there are more to learn than in an alphabet but nothing to decode. Kanji, the Chinese characters, are a longer road, but you do not need them to begin, and a course that starts with kana lets you read everything a beginner meets.
Vietnamese. The script is Latin, which is the good news. The work is the marks: six tones written as diacritics above and below the vowels, plus modified letters like ă, â, ê, ô, ơ, ư and đ. A word's meaning changes with its tone, so the marks are not decoration; they are letters. Learn them as a set, with their sounds, before anything else.
How to learn a script in two weeks
- Ten to fifteen minutes a day, no more. Scripts are learned by many short exposures; a three-hour session on Sunday produces a headache and a blur.
- Sound and shape together. Never learn a character silently. Say its sound as you trace it, every time.
- Trace before you write. Following the stroke order with your finger or a stylus builds the shape into the hand, which is a second memory alongside the eye.
- Group by similarity and by trap. Learn the look-alikes side by side so the difference is the thing you remember: シ and ツ, ㅏ and ㅓ, Ш and Щ.
- Read from day three. Real words, however slowly. Street signs, menus, names of films. Reading is what turns a memorised table into a script you can use.
- Type it. Install the keyboard on your phone in week one and write a message to someone. Typing forces recall of every character.
What not to do
Do not use romanisation as a crutch past the first day. A learner who reads Japanese in Latin letters for a month has to unlearn the habit, and has meanwhile been learning pronunciations that the romanisation only approximates. The script is the pronunciation guide; the sooner you read it, the sooner you hear the language correctly.
In LinguaPair
Every course begins with an A0 level dedicated to the writing system: a table of the characters, each one voiced so you always learn the sound with the shape, and tracing exercises where you follow the strokes on screen before you are asked to recognise the character in a word. The lessons move into real words as soon as you can read them, so the script is never studied on its own for longer than it needs to be. For Vietnamese the same level teaches the tones and marks as a set, with the sound of each. Two weeks of short sessions, and the page stops looking like the reason not to start.