… which heavily involves memorizing foreign letters. English and German mostly share the same alphabet, though, which suggests that the person asking the question hasn’t quite grasped the point. That’s what I was trying to get at in my comment.
If you tried to teach English-speaking children with words that start with that letter in German, you'd probably confuse them quite a bit.
- a bear that looks like B
- an orange that looks like O
- a snake that looks like S
- a tree that looks like T
(and so on; that's just what I can think of off the top of my head)
Also, "foreign" is always relative. How about an Ancient Greek referring to the barbarians who have no Greek? And, the author's using Greek while living in China.