Problems memorizing alphabets

I learned how to read Arabic, Katakana/Hiragana, and Hebrew but it has been many years and I only remember the Hebrew letters. A way to do it with mnemonics is to use images that look like the letters. There’s a description here: Cyrillic Russian Alphabet mnemonics?

Hebrew and Arabic are related languages with letters that originated as pictures. Even now, you can still see some of the shapes in our Latin-based letters.

Example: “Aleph” come from a word for “ox”.

which was stylized like this in ancient Semitic languages like Hebrew and Phoenician:

which was rotated by the Greeks into “A”.

Each Semitic letter has an associated image. Wikipedia has more information.

1 Like