Going the other direction, Hungarians can learn many European languages easier than Russian, because the script is the same, which makes orthography and pronunciation easier to reason about, and vocabulary easier to acquire.
Can you make out anything in this article other than personal names?
I'm not sure that that applies very well to cyrillic vs latin though. IIRC cyrillic is still under ~50 unique characters, so a dictionary would essentially need an index to tell you what the alphabetic ordering is, and then I think you'd be set (as well as you can be with just a dictionary, at least).
Technical words, recent inventions, sports and brand names tend to be straightforward transliterations. Plus more are borrowed. Take Russian words like диносавр, Макдоналдс, киоск, and гамбургер. You probably have no idea what they mean, but the direct transliterations are dinosavr, Makdonalds, kiosk, and gamburger are a little easier to guess?
Not every word by any means. For example refrigerator is холодильник (roughly xolodinьik though the initial sound is not in English). Which literally translates as "cold making thing". But enough to be helpful more often than you'd guess.
Also, холодильник would be transliterated something like kholodeelnik.
But you always have to be aware of "false friends". Russian магазин (magazin) does not mean what one might think it does.
Just goes to show that even between English and French, same alphabet or not, just because a word looks familiar it does not mean that one can guess the meaning correctly.
From this experience I would be weary of any words that sound similar to English in a foreign language.
And even if you do - you will be reading it letter by letter, while even foreign latin-based script you can read almost as fast as your own language.
That's what I meant by the big difference between the two. Switching from Chinese characters like Vietnam did isn't the same effect as switching from a Cyrillic alphabet which is much simpler.
I'll say this, for work I travel to Montreal at moderately regular intervals. Because everything is in French, it makes it a bit harder, but I can either: a) infer based off similarities to English words b) look it up as it only has a few unique glyphs versus what I'm accustomed to.
If it is in Latin script, the tourists from countries with Latin-based languages can phonetically butcher whatever it is they're attempting to communicate with the other party.
If it is in Cyrillic script, the tourists from countries with Latin-based languages can just stare at a person blankly or point at words on paper/signage if the other party is close enough. Provided they traveled at all for fear of this scenario.
Honestly, I think it is reasonable to attempt to obtain at least a passing capability to communicate in a foreign area, but the question is why would someone used to a Latin language prefer a similarly derived language vs one with completely different glyphs.
Cyrilic is extremely easy to learn, you can do it in under an hour, and even in Russia most places that tourists interact will have latin and cyrilic versions of the same text (on the metro, etc).
Countries like China are tougher to travel in, but it's not exactly difficult.
Uh, no, that's definitely wrong. Learning Chinese script is a very difficult and time-consuming task. Literacy in Japanese requires about 2,000 characters; literacy in Chinese requires about 5,000.
I modified my comment to better reflect the intention.
Of course. But would converting Korean to a romanized system somehow change that?
English and French are both originated from Latin languages so are similarities.
Try to read Turkish web site: http://www.mfa.gov.tr/default.tr.mfa , will its Latin alphabet help you?
The site has English version so you can compare.
But to your example, I'd feel more comfortable fumbling around looking in a English to Turkish book looking for D followed by i without dot (I'm sure it has a better name than that, but furthering the point where vaguely similar glyphs help), followed by s with a protruding curl at bottom (see previous parentheses), etc.
take "Лекарь (doctor), not Пекарь (baker)" from a comment lower in the page, I can't say for certain that I would have known the first two characters in each of the two words were different with maybe it being an analog to capitalization, cursive, italics or some other modification of an individual character.
That's the problem right there. Speaking only one language is super limiting.
So as soon as you 'pick one language' you are talking about two languages, your birth tongue and another one. This was not the case with the comment I replied to so either you are off-topic or you really are confused. So I guess you are off-topic then rather than confused?
If anything, I’d say the initial statement of the limited nature of speaking a single language was off-topic. True, yes, on topic, not so sure.
I can only assume you have never been to francophone or lusaphone Africa or many Latin American countries. Yes, if you search you might be able to find an intelligentsia that can manage some English, but the majority of people you meet will expect to communicate in French, Spanish or Portuguese.
No, seriously, the level of English in those countries is sometimes so low that you won’t even be able to obtain the most rudimentary things. In francophone Africa, even French is sometimes limited only to the upper classes. (In Madagascar, for instance, French disappears as soon as you leave the capital city and people generally speak solely Malagasy from then on.)
Only a person who hasn’t actually traveled on every continent will believe that English (or even other languages) is widely enough spoken now to always get by. There is a reason that that "point to the picture" phrase book is still published and loads of travelers swear by it.
With a language if you don't use it you forget it.
It's a completely different proposition if you're somewhere rural.
I think that is worse here in Australia than in some other parts of the English-speaking world. I mean, in Canada, the obvious choice is French; in parts of the US it is probably Spanish. There is no obvious choice in Australia.
Back in the 1980s, Japan was having a major economic boom, and it was thought that everyone should learn Japanese. Since then, the Japanese economy has been rather sluggish, and now people don't think that so much any more. China is booming, so now people think they should learn Chinese instead. (Although, I think learning Japanese is easier for native English-speakers than learning Chinese–no tones to worry about.)
1. far easier to look up a word you don't know in a dictionary
2. you can make a stab at pronouncing the word
3. you can type it in on your western laptop/phone you brought with you
My laptop flips to French fairly regularly (machine was created with an image containing French and English keyboards) and it is frustrating as it is only easier in the sense that it is poking around for the 1 key to find e with grave or the like vs playing with keystrokes until I land on alt+0232 on numpad.
Phones with touchscreen keyboards though, yeah, I could see that being reasonably okay.
Typing Armenian was a non-starter. I'm not dyslexic, but felt it when faced with words that looked like "արարողակարգը" (random copy-paste from Wikipedia[1]).
The second language was often Russian, and typing in Cyrillic was a little better, especially once I found the alphabet is derived from Greek rather than Latin -- so р is r, and н is e, and п is p. But it was still 10 times slower than typing rough Vietnamese into my phone.
But anyway, this is clearly a political change, so any reasoning in favour or opposition is irrelevant.
[1] https://hy.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D5%80%D5%A1%D5%B5%D5%A5%D6%80... (Armenian Alphabet in Armenian).
https://design.canonical.com/2011/08/alphabet-development/ has a small diagram including Greek, Cyrillic and Latin.
Protecting themselves from Russian insurgency, among other reasons. Kazakhstan had protected themselves before, shutting down Russian-inspired "People Republic".
According to the article there is 20% of ethnic Russians and more fluent Russian speakers (94%) than Kazakh speakers (74%).
Russian is also a co-official language in Kazkhstan and I can't find anything about getting rid of that.
Latin (and Cyrillic) alphabet is also no cipher.
It's easy to learn one when you know the other, the shapes are similar, some letters are shared (some with same, some with different sounds), etc. The difference could be even said to be cosmetic at best, unlike Korean, Chinese or Arabic scripts that are completely different shapes and styles and hand moves when writing and so on.
If you learn Russian in a Polish school as a second foreign language (second to German or English, as I did) it goes at a snail's pace of two or three lesson per week but Cyrillic is like a month or two of that at best.
Any Russian who knows at all any of the big western languages (Spanish, French, German, English) or one of the right Slavic ones (the ones not using only Cyrillic in their writing) also already knows the Latin script.
Moldova and Azerbaijan using Latin script didn't help with Transnistria and Artsakh at all.
Georgian script[0] is also nothing like Cyrillic or Latin (I know them both but at Georgian I can only stare blankly) but that hasn't helped with Abkhazia or South Ossetia.
If a Russian spy, insurgent or whatever wants to blend in, operate or whatever somewhere, he probably can do it easier in Kazakhstan than in those disputed regions.
If anything, sidelining Russian artificially because "Latin = West = good = we want" is only giving Russia a really good excuse of caring about ethnic Russians (not that they needed any big one like that for Crimea where Cyrillic and Russian weren't sidelined at all).
It's also bad from a practicality standpoint, forcing everyone to pick up Latin script suddenly (while before now the two main languages used the same one) and paying for replacing all the plaques and official books and documents and such. It won't help tourists either, if you don't know Kazakh then you just don't. I can read Cyrillic and can read some Russian very slowly by my crappy basic skills from school years and using Polish as a crutch but I can't read Kazakh at all.
You can clutch your way between very many European languages (and the Cyrillic/Latin split in the Slavic group is the only major roadblock in a single group to doing this that I know of, as in - the script is the big problem, not the language itself) but looking at Kazakh is as good as looking at Turkish or Vietnamese or Malay or transcribed Chinese. You get maybe an occasional global-y word like hamburger, pizza, republic or computer at best.
Look at the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Russia was succeeded to instigate an insurgency there mostly because people there were heavily influenced by Russian propaganda.
And I assume after those events Kazakhstan had additional incentive to go further away from Russia.
This is playing with fire.
There's no protections from that kind of behaviour.
Less subconscious negative feeling from Latin-alphabet-users? It's a linguistic version of website moving to "flat" UI design.
For example it doesn't cover Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Czech, Vietnamese, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Irish, Occitan, Croatian, etc...
It does cover Malay though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malay_alphabet
> French (accents can be dropped)
What? No! See for example https://french.stackexchange.com/a/24410
In Italian, however, accents are only on the last letter of a word so they are usually replaced with apostrophes if your keyboard lacks them (in fact even on an Italian keyboard È is usually typed as E'; most word processors autocorrect it).
Anyway, for example "a" and "à" are homophones. As are "la" and "là".
A nice one is "chasse"/"châsse". Both are pronounced \ʃas\ but the first one means "hunt", the latter one means "reliquary".
Dutch, like English, is almost ASCII, though there are things like "één".
Is there an issue with Turkish scholarship of history since Ataturk pushed Latin-based alphabet?
But that's why we have printing presses that make translations into contemporary scripts and vernaculars.
Before things were ancient, they were contemporary. Not teaching older scripts to everybody =/= no one knows older scripts.