Writing Systems of the World | Abjads, Alphabets, Abugidas, Syllabaries & Logosyllabaries

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How many letters/syllables/characters?
English: 26
French: 26
Germany: 27
Russian: 33
Chinese: Yes

I would love to see a family tree video for languages. Modern languages at the bottom and trace them up as far as we can. That would be very interesting.

Respect to Korean King who created Korean script!

This guy was genious to simplify it.

This whole time I thought it was complex as Japanese not to mention, Korean script looks all alike... now I know why it looks all the same and that actually makes it easier.

All you need is to memorize 14 + 10 (if I counted correctly) letters to combine them by playing tetris to get desireable combination of sounds.

i'm a native english speaker who can read both cyrillic and hangeul and even though they're both pretty simple alphabets, hangeul was so much easier to learn because you're not having to retrain your brain to recognize familiar letters as having a different sound. when i went to russia it was so hard to stop reading PECTOPAH as peck-toh-pah and start reading it as res-to-ran.

Hangul was literally designed to be easy to learn, it’s very straightforward

"Pacific Ocean" - all the Cs are pronounced differently...

I just found out Korean is the easiest writing system to understand between all of East Asian languages

0:14 Introduction
0:49 Alphabets
3:09 Abjads
5:11 Syllabaries
7:08 Logosyllabaries
8:05 Abugidas

Fun fact:
If you(as a Chinese Characters learner) always forget how to write Chinese Characters, and that frustrated you much
The fact is: We (as a native Chinese speaker) also forget how to write Chinese Characters quiet often!

EX:
我的舅舅喜歡在客廳吃鳳梨
Eng translation: My uncle likes eating pineapple in the living room

Within this very simple sentence, 12 characters, I can't write 5 characters
Let me be clear, I can read, speak, understand it. I can type these words on computer easily
but I don't remember how to write it on paper with pen

I believe there are also quiet many native Chinese speakers can't write above sentence with only paper and pen lol

Don't get overwhelmed when you see the Korean alphabet chart. You only need to know 5 basic consonants and 3 vowels. Adding or combine these 8 characters to make other sounds

When we talk to people from Asia or the Middle East we must always remember that in order to learn English they had to learn the Latin alphabet too. Respect them.

Japanese is both a syllabary and a logo-syllabary. It’s a mix between Japanese kana (hiragana/katakana) and kanji. A good amount of kanji came from China, but some were made in japan. Chinese uses strings of their characters together, while Japanese has kanji mixed with kana. 小 means “small” in Japanese as well, one of its readings is “shō,” but in its adjective form, 小さい” “chīsaī,” it’s pronounced “chī.”

Japanese is also using Chinese words which they call "Kanji" (Chinese Character) along side those kanas.

Korean was designed rather recently with intention to replace difficult Chinese writing system. And it even got a proper documentation.
No wonder why it is more logical.

One important note about the abugida system is that you do not need to memorize they symbols for every single constant+vowel pair. The same exact vowel diacritics can be used to attach that vowel to any consonant sound. For example to write ke in Hindi, you would need to add a slanted tick on top of the symbol ka(क) and you get ke(के). To write pe in Hindi, you need to do the exact same thing of adding that slanted tick on top of the symbol, so pa(प) becomes pe(पे).

It's so mind-blowing because somehow, I accidentally learned all five-way to write.
From
Abjads: Arabic (I learned it for at least a decade since I grew up in the Indonesian Muslim community)
Alphabet: just like the rest of you, learn it at school
Abugidas: Javanese ancient ha-na-cha-ra-ka (Since I am a Javanese tribe)
Syllabaries: Korean 안영! (if it still counted, finally learn it for the last three years, cuz I love their movies and dramas)
And the last, Logo-Syllabaries: Mandarin (learn it because I have a hard time with the double consonant in the Korean and found apparently, that Mandarin is so much fun! 你好 我是Amy！我很高兴认识你🤗

CORRECTION: The vowels on Shalom should be שָׁלוֹם

Cut him some slack, guys, Chinese is hard.

This was eye-opening! Thank you very much! Never in my life could i imagine that in 10 minutes i would be able to understand the mechanics of a dozen languages that usually look like random symbols to me.