Happy New Year, gamer girl here!

I'm Mignon Foggedy and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language,

writing history, rules and cool stuff.

Today, I'm thinking about New Year's resolutions.

I'm going to continue learning Spanish, my husband actually got me Spanish workbooks for

Christmas, but some of you might have resolved to learn a new language that uses a different

alphabet or script.

So I thought this piece by Peter Kernicki about why Asian languages have so many different

scripts might be particularly interesting right now.

Let's get started.

You don't have to learn a new script when you learn Norwegian, Czech or Portuguese, let

alone French.

So why does every East Asian language require you to learn a new script as well?

In Europe, the Roman script of Latin became standard and it was never seriously challenged

by runes or by the Greek Cyrillic or a glogolitic alphabet.

Logolitic is an early Slavic script.

You still have to learn the Greek alphabet for Greek or the Cyrillic alphabet for Russian,

Bulgarian and Serbian, but they're the only exceptions.

On the other hand, in East Asia today, the logo graphic script based on the Chinese characters

is used in China while Korean uses the indigenous Hangul.

Japanese uses a mixture of Chinese characters and two different syllabaries.

Vietnamese uses the Roman alphabet and Mongolian uses the Cyrillic alphabet.

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