Not Every Language Has an ABC

Your child learns twenty six letters and quietly assumes the rest of the world learned them too.

That assumption is lovely, and it is worth opening up, because what sits on the other side of it is one of the most beautiful things in any language.

Letters Are Only One Idea

An alphabet is a system where each symbol stands for roughly one sound. It is a good system. It is also only one of several.

Japanese uses sets of symbols where each one carries a whole syllable, sitting alongside characters borrowed from Chinese. Those Chinese characters stand for meanings rather than sounds, which is one reason speakers of very different Chinese languages can often read the same page. In Devanagari, used for Hindi and many of its neighbours, vowels attach to consonants like small hooks instead of standing alone. Korean takes its letters and stacks them into tidy syllable blocks, so a word looks like a short row of tiles.

Direction is not fixed either. Arabic and Hebrew run from right to left, so a book opens from the side your child would call the back.

Why Children Take to This

Young learners meet a new script the way they meet a puzzle. There is no grammar to worry about and no vocabulary to forget. There is only shape, and children are very good at shape.

A few gentle ways to begin:

• Look at the same word written in two scripts and find the parts that repeat.
• Copy three characters slowly with a pencil and watch the order of the strokes.
• Ask which way the writing runs, then follow it with a finger.
• Invent a symbol together for a sound in your own mother tongue.
• Keep a small notebook of the shapes your child likes best.

Start With One Script

You do not need to learn a language to enjoy the way it is written. Pick one script, learn three symbols, and let the curiosity carry the rest.

Have a look at the languages your family is drawn to, or search a word and see the shape it makes on the page.

Browse Languages and open the Dictionary to start exploring today.