A question that I get a lot from my friends who see me studying languages: Is it worth it to learn how to read and write or should I just focus on speech? My answer always comes down to it depends on why you are studying the language. If you are just studying it to go visit the country and be able to ask how much something is then learning to speak is your best option. If you are like me and want to read the literature and learn about the culture in the original language then learning to read and write is important.
The second question that I get is which of the languages is easier to learn reading and writing wise. I've learned Korean, Japanese some chinese and currently learning Thai. By far the Korean alphabet was the easiest to learn. It took me 2 hours to learn the whole alphabet. The second easiest was Japanese, learning the Hiragana and Katakana took one afternoon. Next comes Chinese but the problem with Chinese is the shear amount of characters there is to learn. Finally, the Thai alphabet because a lot of its characters look the same.
Japanese alphabets.
Chinese doesn’t have an alphabet it has thousands of characters.
Next is Thai alphabet
The vowels are not included here.
