Phabetia

Learn to read another alphabet

Looking at a text in Greek, Russian or Georgian and not even being able to tell where one word ends is a small obstacle, and it goes away in a few days. Phabetia teaches only that: recognising the letters, one by one, until they stop looking like drawings.

It does not teach the language or the grammar. It teaches the alphabet, which is the door: without it a sign, a map or a menu stay unreadable; with it, a lot of words suddenly become recognisable, because they are words you already know written another way.

It runs in the browser, with nothing to install and no account to create. Each round takes less than a minute, and the letters that give you trouble keep coming back until they stop giving you trouble.

The alphabets

How you learn it in Phabetia

Every new letter is introduced first with its name and its Latin equivalent, and you have to recognise it before you start practising it. Then come the exercises: letter to sound, sound to letter, quick memory, telling it apart from the Latin letter it resembles, spotting the intruder, completing a word and reading one.

Characters arrive two or three at a time and are never dropped: each level carries the previous ones along. What you get wrong comes back sooner and more often; what you have mastered shows up rarely, and anything you have not seen for days climbs back up on its own.

There are no lives and no punishment: getting one wrong interrupts nothing. To move on you only need 70 % right.