One of the hardest things when learning a language (which isn’t written in the same writing system as yours) is to know when and if you need to learn the writing system. Some languages lean heavily on their written traditions, and for others, writing is a relatively new development. The type of writing system can further complicate this decision since some are going to be more intuitive than others.
Take into consideration why you’re learning the language in the first place, what type of writing system you’re facing, how complex it is in comparison to what you’re used to, and how deep the literary traditions run. Your reason to learn determines how much time and effort you can afford for the language. Your learning style determines how much it might help you. The type of writing system and its complexity (usually measured in comparison to your native language, which will be assumed to be English for the sake of convenience) will determine how much effort is required. The literary tradition of the language affects how essential to the learning process the written language is.
Purpose For Learning
I worked as a private English tutor for many years. The purpose of why someone is learning a language is just as important as how much effort they’re willing to put into it. Effort without purpose is as fruitless as watering the weeds in your garden. A student needs to have both the will to learn, a way to gauge success, and a reason to care.
If a student couldn’t tell me why they cared to learn English, I would usually try to lose them sooner than later. Why are you learning your language of choice? My most motivated student ever was learning so he could understand rap. Your reason doesn’t need to be something selfless or noble, it just needs to be something which you care about. If you learn Japanese to understand Anime, you’ll get further than someone who is learning Mandarin because it’s profitable but who doesn’t care about money (ironically, this constitutes a lot of business majors abroad in China).
If your reason is to just learn because you like learning, you need to go a little bit further. Find something you can cling to which also gives you a goal. Learning for the sake of learning is great, but without goals, how do you measure success? If I just read a bunch of articles, I might learn something, but what is it all for? How do you collate the information and make it useful?
You can usually find language learning materials for most languages in some kind of Romanization up to a certain point, but afterwards, it’s expected you know how to read the language. How far are you going and why? If you want to go for fluency, you’ll need to learn to read and write, but if you just need to learn practical, business language, you may not.
Learning Styles
Learning style also affects how practical learning to write is. I need to be able to read and write something for a language, despite it being one of my linguistic weaknesses. The act of being able to reading and writing something solidifies it more than just repeating it or hearing it over and over again. Will the writing system help you or is it just another thing to learn? If it’s just another thing to learn, how much will it impact the learning process?
Deciding to Learn to Write
The decision to learn to write the language can be as trivial as going to a language like Spanish, or as hard as going to Chinese. The closer the language is to your native language, the more likely it is that the writing systems are similar or otherwise related. The exception is going to be in situations where the geopolitical relationships have shifted heavily (like the former Soviet Bloc, though they still have a shared literary tradition, the social attitude towards it has changed).
If you’re just going to travel, learning the written language can run the gamut from trivial to impossible. If you’re going to China for a week, you probably don’t need to learn more than a few characters for the bare necessities. Living somewhere is going to make this decision a bit more essential to your comfort of living. I quite literally would not have made it in China if I skipped the writing system. Some people can get lucky and skirt by, but how do you live independently if you can’t even read a street sign?
Writing Systems
The world is full of different writing systems, but almost all of the major ones can be broken down into the following categories per Daniels and Bright (Daniels, Peter T. and Bright, William (eds.) 1996. The World’s Writing Systems. New York: Oxford University Press.).
Logosyllabary
A logosyllabary, or logographic system would be something like Chinese where a single character constitutes a single syllable and a single concept. This type of writing system requires heavy memorization and practice, and even native speakers struggle with it (especially if they don’t write for a while). Japanese, and to a much lesser extent Korean, incorporate parts of a logographic system into their written language.
Syllabary
Syllabaries are writing systems based on the individual syllables of a language. The most popular example would be Japanese Kana. A syllabary is typically pretty easy to learn all things considered, but they don’t usually exist in languages with a large number of phonemes. The more potential syllables, the less likely the language uses a syllabary in practice.
Alphabet
This is what most European language speakers are used to. An alphabet contains characters, or letters, which correspond to a segmental phoneme (when created). Most language’s writing systems grow slower than speech, so a lot of times an alphabet will grow to where certain words are written separately from what they should be phonetically. Think of English’s “knee” or “knight”, or something like the difference (or lack there of) between “there”, “their”, and “they’re” in most dialects.
Abjad
An abjad is a system based on consonants. The Semitic languages (e.g. Hebrew and Arabic) are the most well known languages which employ abjads. The vowels are implied, though almost all abjad based systems do include diacritics or similar symbols to mark vowels (usually only for learning).
Abugida
An abugida is somewhere between an abjad and an alphabet. A specific vowel is either implied or notated via diacritics or some other markup. Devanagari or the Tibetan writing system make up the most well known examples of this writing system. Thai also arguably employs an abugida despite most people referring to it as an alphabet.
Featural System
The only real example of note is Hangul for a featural system of writing. Hangul is basically an alphabet, but with rules for how each syllable is put together as an individual glyph. This is a major oversimplification, but good enough for this purpose.
Writing System Complexity
The complexity of a writing system affects how easy it is to learn. Virtually no qualified linguist will argue that one language is objectively harder than another, but this doesn’t necessarily apply to a writing system. Learning 1,000 Chinese characters is a bit more of a daunting task than learning 26 letters, and it won’t even get you close to a college educated level. You can learn some writing systems over a weekend; others you’ll struggle with over a lifetime.
The raw number of characters, letters, symbols, etc. isn’t the only measure of complexity. How do the pieces go together? Why are “night” and “knight” pronounced the same aside from “because that’s how people pronounce them”? The longer a writing system has existed, the more the language has grown and changed. And, the more active the literary tradition, the more likely it is for the writing system to get complex barring some kind of cultural shift (spelling rules or similar).
The Thai “alphabet” (which is actually somewhere between an abugida and an alphabet depending on who you ask) has 59 “letters” (and some other stuff), but has much more complex rules than many writing systems. You can probably learn the Greek alphabet, Cyrillic, and Hangul before the Thai writing system. Thai isn’t hard for the sake of being hard, it’s hard because of the rules governing it and the natural growth of the language.
Literary Traditions
The literary tradition heavily impacts how useful the written language is and how far you can go without learning to read and write. You will hit a glass ceiling if you aren’t literate and you try to learn Mandarin. No matter how good you get at the language, Chinese (basically any dialect) references things which only make sense in the context of the written language. If you can’t read or write, you can’t easily participate.
How far do you want to take your language learning journey? If you’re going for a vacation to China, referencing Chengyu is way lower on the list than finding a toilet. If you’re studying abroad, being able to communicate naturally and authentically will become immensely important once you can communicate basic needs.
The general rule of thumb is that the longer the consistent cultural identity and the longer the literary tradition, the more important the written language. Learning to read and write Arabic is going to do more for your language learning than learning to read and write for a language which has just introduced or changed a writing system, or for a culture which has undergone massive changes in borders over the years.
Descriptionism vs. Prescriptionism
You can get by in China without learning any Chinese characters, but you will hit a limit to your progress. You can also get by without learning the pronunciation for German, but you’re going to look stupid pointing and grunting at something you want when it’s written right there and the pronunciation is standardized. Both have long literary traditions, but the difference is in how they approach their writing system.
Chinese just repurposes and adds characters as necessary (granted, there was the movement to simplify characters and other lingusitic movements), but Germany has no issues issuing a new linguistic standard every year or so for the written language. Chinese is going to be much more descriptionistic, while German is much more prescriptionistic.
Descriptionism and prescriptionism are different approaches to linguistics. Descriptionism concerns itself with describing the language as it is, while prescriptionism concerns itself with setting a standard and enforcing it. The more naturally a language grows, the higher the chance is that the spoken language will change faster than the written language. Germany has no qualms issuing a new standard about whether an eszett is valid somewhere, while English speaking countries are content to just let the language do what it wants and add the new words to the dictionary.
While the different approaches each have their pros and their cons and are the subject of constant arguments between different social sciences, we aren’t going to go there. What’s important to note is that a language which is prescriptionistic is going to be easier to learn to write in most cases. The more the standard, written language is controlled, the more rule based it’s going to end up. You can learn the pronunciation for standard written German in a weekend, you probably can’t do the same for French.
Deciding to Learn the Writing System
The most key piece to deciding to learn the writing system or not is to decide why you want to learn the language. If you’re learning for travel, you’ll do best to just memorize a few pieces, but if you’re learning because you like the culture, the writing system will mean a lot more. If you just want to talk to people, writing won’t help much. But, if your goals are a bit fuzzier, you need to take more factors into account to decide whether to learn to write or not.
I have to see something written down to really get it, what about you? How do you learn best? How hard is the writing system compared to what you’re used to, and ho hard is it overall? You can spend a year learning to write Chinese and a 6 year old in China will be more functionally literate by far. Some writing systems are going to be less intuitive and more organic than others. Thai will probably be harder than Korean for the majority of foreign learners.
The difficulty and reason you’re even bothering to learn will determine whether it’s even worth considering. If you have a month in Spain, you want to learn the writing system, but a month in Thailand may mean you just memorize a few important words unless you have a more compelling reason to learn.
How much does the literary tradition factor into the spoken language, and how consistent has it been? You’ll hit a glass ceiling quick in Chinese if you don’t know certain literary concepts, but it won’t really matter for modern Mongolian. The linguistic attitude of the country (or countries) which speak your target language will affect the difficulty. A prescriptionist approach makes the language easiest for learners if everything else is equal.
Ultimately, if you want to learn to write a new language, go for it, but don’t learn for the wrong reasons. Learning to write won’t help you unless you have a reason to read and write. That reason can be as simple as “because I want to”, but you have to want to fulfill it. Don’t feel compelled to learn to read and write in a new language if it’s harder than you’re willing to work and it isn’t going to help you.
Featured image by Robert Pastryk from Pixabay