During this trip I come across five different alphabets – Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian and Armenian. Being able to decipher what is written has been very useful in several trips. When reading timetables, menus in the restaurant, addresses in maps, or buttons in different machines. Apart of Latin/Roman alphabet, I manage well the Cyrillic.
I learned it during the first world trip we spent almost 3 months in Russia and that remained and has been useful occasionally.
Greek has some similarities to Cyrillic plus is useful to remember the mathematical symbols learned at university.
The Georgian is supposed to be easy to learn, and will be a task for the next visit. The Armenian is a bit larger (38 letters), and somehow it seemed to me that several people writes in Cyrillic. SMSes are sometimes sent using a Latin transcription.
Other alphabets I tried was in South Korea, where I learned how to read Hangul. In that language each symbol is a syllable with two to four letters and each letter try to imitate the mouth movements.
I tried to learn to read Hebrew and some Japanese, but without success.
Recently just saw this map of Turkey, which shows it is surrounded by countries with different alphabets.
Definitely this is one hit of my trip.