Hacker News Reader

Russian is much easier for English speakers to learn than Finnish or Estonian, yet they’re in the same category on this map.

It doesn’t seem like a very useful ranking, at least for the smaller national languages.

View on HN

You have to learn a new alphabet for Russian. This is also one of the reasons for the high difficulty classification of the Asian languages that have their own scripts.

To find out how difficult it will be to learn a script just have a look at mechanical typewriters used for those scripts:

Russian/Ukrainian: [1]

Greek: [2]

Chinese: [3]

Learning Cyrillic or Greek or Asian phonetic scripts like Katakana or Hangul is not that difficult since they are conceptually similar to Latin script. Learning ideographic scripts like those used in China or Japan (Kanji) is another story.

[1] https://www.mrmrsvintagetypewriters.com/cdn/shop/files/DSC_3...

[2] https://www.mrmrsvintagetypewriters.com/cdn/shop/products/DS...

[3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Ch...

Yeah, my attempts to learn Estonian met with roughly the same success as my attempts to learn Latin.

Japanese was easier. German too. Spanish was much easier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com