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European Day of Languages · 26 September

Discover scripts

All over the world people say “hello” – but they write it in very different ways. Look at the scripts and copy the greeting onto the line.

hello

Latin script

26 basic letters, used for English, German, Turkish and many other languages.

Writing direction: left to right · English

Copy it:
здравствуйте

Cyrillic script

Used for Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and other languages.

Writing direction: left to right · Russian

Copy it:
γεια σου

Greek script

24 letters – you may know some from maths, such as pi.

Writing direction: left to right · Greek

Copy it:
مَرْحَبًا

Arabic script

28 letters that are usually joined together within a word.

Writing direction: right to left · Arabic

Copy it:
你好

Chinese characters

Each character stands for a syllable with a meaning. Everyday reading needs a few thousand characters.

Writing direction: today mostly left to right · Chinese

Copy it:
こんにちは

Japanese hiragana

A syllabary with 46 basic characters. Japanese mixes it with katakana and Chinese characters.

Writing direction: today mostly left to right · Japanese

Copy it:
안녕하세요

Korean Hangul

Invented in the 15th century: letters are combined into syllable blocks.

Writing direction: left to right · Korean

Copy it: