A recent anecdote: I just created my own script that’s close to roman alphabet structurally with a few modifications.
Learning it, memorizing the parts and some rules takes ~1 hour.
This makes me think that the hard think about learning reading/writing is the initial visualsymbol-language mapping. Not just getting the symbols and rules into your head.
the hard thing about learning reading/writing is the initial visualsymbol-language mapping.
This was also my experience learning to read Tengwar(Tolkien’s writing system for his elvish languages), and Hangul (but I also learned to read some non-alphabet scripts in childhood, so that might be an advantage). I agree the concept of writing down language at all is the hardest to grok, and once you have that down, literacy is fairly easy to transfer to new scripts.
Incidentally, this might explain the unexpectedly strong reaction against the very idea of a script for writing sign language I found amongst the deaf. I conjecture they might not have made this connection, and treat their signing and the symbolic manipulation they perform for, say, English, as entirely different.
A recent anecdote: I just created my own script that’s close to roman alphabet structurally with a few modifications.
Learning it, memorizing the parts and some rules takes ~1 hour.
This makes me think that the hard think about learning reading/writing is the initial visualsymbol-language mapping. Not just getting the symbols and rules into your head.
This was also my experience learning to read Tengwar (Tolkien’s writing system for his elvish languages), and Hangul (but I also learned to read some non-alphabet scripts in childhood, so that might be an advantage). I agree the concept of writing down language at all is the hardest to grok, and once you have that down, literacy is fairly easy to transfer to new scripts.
Incidentally, this might explain the unexpectedly strong reaction against the very idea of a script for writing sign language I found amongst the deaf. I conjecture they might not have made this connection, and treat their signing and the symbolic manipulation they perform for, say, English, as entirely different.
maybe inventing the idea of writing down sounds is hard the first time. but i can’t imagine it being hard to learn.