Let's Compare the World's Writing Systems

The world has countless languages, and the scripts used to write them are just as varied. Let's take a look at how the languages you can learn on this site are written.

English, Spanish, German, French, and Italian all share the same Latin alphabet. The core is 26 letters, but each language adds its own accented characters, like ü in German, é in French, or ñ in Spanish.

Japanese is a bit special: it combines three different scripts - hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are phonetic scripts that represent sounds, while kanji, borrowed from Chinese, are logographic characters where each one carries its own meaning.

Chinese is written entirely in hanzi (Chinese characters). Even though many characters look similar to Japanese kanji, in Chinese each character functions as the basic unit of a word on its own.

Korean Hangul is a relatively young script, created in the 15th century. Consonants and vowels combine into syllable blocks, giving Hangul its distinctive square-shaped look.

Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. Some letters look similar to Latin ones, but their pronunciation is often completely different, so it's worth paying attention.

Hindi's Devanagari script works differently: each consonant letter already carries a built-in "a" vowel sound, and you only add a mark when you want a different vowel.

Arabic is written from right to left, and it's cursive - the same letter can change shape depending on whether it appears at the start, middle, or end of a word.

Even though these scripts look completely different from one another, they all serve the same purpose: recording sounds and meaning so people can pass them from one person to another. Take a look at the actual scripts on each language's own pages.