In the city I grew up in, there were many unfamiliar symbols all around me. Though I am of Chinese heritage, I did not learn Chinese until I decided to do so myself as an "adult learner". So, returning to places I spent time in as I grew up living with my parents, my surroundings have become literally more readable to me now.

There is often a fairly big "barrier to entry" to learn how to read some new script. Particularly in the case of languages like Chinese or Japanese, you have to learn to recognize unfamilar forms and associate those forms with unfamiliar sounds. Once you pass the initial barrier of getting started, however, you open up the floodgates to learn a whole lot very quickly.

Living in a bilingual dictionary

I don't spend very much time at all actively studying Spanish. However, just by living in California and taking the time to try to decipher bits and pieces of written Spanish (materials/signs/etc. are often translated), I feel pretty comfortable in (formal) Spanish.

Other parts of the world have different sets of languages. In East Asia, it is easy to study at once Chinese, Japanese, and Korean because in major cities where tourists are likely to be you will often see information presented in all three of these languages plus English.

If you learn the basics of reading some other script and also know how to look up unfamiliar words (whether on your phone or using paper resources), you can quickly learn lots of vocabulary with very little effort.

시작이 반 이다.
Starting is half the battle

An anecdote

Let me share with you how I began learning Korean. Growing up through grade school, I had many classmates of Korean ethnicity. One day, I got bored in class, so I asked a classmate to show me how the Korean writing system worked.

I got very interested because I liked how Korean sounded and looked and found Korean people pretty interesting too (they acted with intensity). Stashed away somewhere, I probably still have some of the scraps of paper I used in those days I first started studying Korean.

Now, in 2020, lots of "Korean" content is popular globally. I would like to say that I started learning Korean "before it was cool". I don't actually really care much for current Korean music, movies, etc. (if I consoomed anything, it would be from decades past; 아저씨 처럼 나 옛날을 기억해).

Learning to read and speak some Korean fairly early on in my life has enabled me to not over-romanticize or chase Korean things just because they are foreign; Korean stuff in fact feels more familiar to me than weird stuff like the American Top 40 chart.

Code Switching

Linguists have this term "code switching" for when people drop in words/phrases/etc. in another language. For example, I might say,

Yesterday's test was no bueno.

Or,

A bird pooped on my head. Am I angry? C'est la vie.

This too is a means by which people can become familar with lots of foreign language stuff.

As much as it pains me to say, there are many weebs on the Internet who are familiar with a fairly large number of Japanese words and phrases from anime. From sensei to senpai, meme shitposting netizens all over the globe are making Japanese a kind of lingua franca of Internet weebdom.

おまえはもう死んでいる
Omae wa mou shinde iru.

The multilingual blog

Overall, I think that is a good idea to preserve standard orthography when possible as well as provide any helpful information for reading/interpreting foreign language words and phrases. That is why for all the alphabet languages (including Korean) in this post I have just used standard orthography. Anyone that cares enough about the specifics to learn Korean can easily look stuff up.

For languages like Chinese and Japanese where you can't learn the script so easily, it is helpful to have some kind of phonetic gloss.

你看得懂没有？
Nǐ kàn-de-dǒng méiyǒu?
Can you understand what you are reading?

You can type all sorts of languages without setting up anything fancy on your computer using Google Input Tools.

I think this way of doing things is preferable over trying to invent ad-hoc Romanization systems (or even using established, but not widely known systems) ¹. There can be lots of confusion over different transliterations, so presenting some foreign language stuff only in transliteration can lead to potential corruption of meaning/intent.

On the other hand, preserving standard orthography means that it will be easy for people that do want to find out more to find out more to do so. If you're feeling generous, providing helpful information to language learners is a considerate to thing too! ²

Challenge for English speaking natives

If you haven't done so already, it probably won't take long to learn the basics of reading French and German words. Here's two strategies you can learn to do this:

• Learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA); this isn't an obscure thing—it is used all over Wikipedia, for instance, to describe how to pronounce names of things
• Watch some introductory YouTube videos reading words in French/German

I have never met anyone who has learned these things and thought it was a waste of time.