learning scripts (Was: the farce that is Urdu)

[Rajarshi Banerjee]

I think people experience radically different degrees of difficulty in
learning new scripts, even if they are based on the same structural
principles.
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Its a question of motivation vs laziness. It is indeed irritating to look at
alien letters and the brain soon tunes out.
My grand mother reads and writes very fluently
nagari, urdu, bengali and english  4 scripts, all learnt during childhood ,
by abbas's definiton she should not exist.
She is also has the highest speed amongst us in reading dissimilar scripts
like gujarati, gurmukhi so as you say childhood exposure may help.

By the way marathi script should be an easier read than gujarati for hindi
speakers assumng we even want to differentiate.

cuniform must have been a hard read because it all looks so similar.
Ofcourse it was easy on the scribes.

pigeon brains can differentiate between rotationally transformed images much
faster than humans.
This proves that the sumerians were pigeons and of course hindi never
existed.

RB