The Cyrillic script is fairly easy to learn and will let you phonetically read a bunch of languages (Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Mongolian, and Serbian to name a few.) Each language has a few unique letters and pronunciation can vary slightly, but for the most part they are the same.
IPA is also amazingly useful if you want to learn another language or even just learn to say someone's name correctly.
Having a notation for sounds helps you to understand and speak foreign languages, because you can think of what someone is saying in IPA and not in some flawed English transcription.
It definitely took me longer than an hour to learn IPA, but aside from that, definitely. I have an amateur interest in linguistics so I picked it up through reading Wikipedia articles on obscure languages, I would say I use it at least once a week.
Very helpful when learning languages that have sounds that aren't in a language you already speak, because your brain tends to map those sounds to similar sounds you already know.
Like how English speakers can't distinguish between French [u] and [ou] (/y/ and /u/ in IPA). Even if you can't hear it you can read about how to articulate it.
Also a little life hack that has served me well for over ten years, and rarely fails me: Wikipedia’s disambiguation page for those hard to Google acronyms. The format will be something like:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_(disambiguation)
If there’s a long list, generally it will be organized by context.
I'd like to tag on Hangul (Korean script). It might not take an hour, but you can definitely learn in less than a day.
The script was created to be simple. As the inventor, King Sejong said: "A wise man can acquaint himself with them (the letters of Hangul) before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days."
A couple of years ago I saw a cartoon for learning Korean script. Unfortunately I did not save that. It was similar to the cartoon posted by HN user rococode about Cyrillic script down here.
I always wondered why in English the constant and the letter π pronounced as /paɪ/ when the Greek letter is obviously /pi/. It really grinds my gears, there's no pie in π!
Does Enlgish routinely localize foreign alphabet names? If so, it's bad practice. I believe no one in the world learns English alphabet pronouncing it arbitrary, and not as /ˈeɪ/ /ˈbiː/ /ˈsiː/.
Note that the Latin alphabet is pronounced inconsistently all across Europe. I'm sure any 14 year old can precisely spell their name out loud in English, since they're going to be examined on it, but later in life people forget the difference between their own language and English, especially the vowels.
For example when speaking English, I find Danish people will mix up E and I if I spell a word with English pronunciation, and Danish people speaking English will often use the Danish pronunciation of J, K, Q, Y (roughly yoll, co, coo, oo).
Doing the Greek course on Duolingo, I discovered that several of the pronunciations for Greek letters I learned in college are incorrect. In gross terms (I don't really know how to use IPA to be more specific here): beta -> veta, delta -> thelta, for example.
It's a result of the Great English Vowel Shift which affected long vowels, and has affected pronunciation of Roman/English letter names (amongst other things) as well (think about the oddness of the name of the letter A in English, for instance) .
The comments about the Great Vowel Shift are correct, but I would also like to add that in English we already pronounce the Latin letter "P" /pi/, and it would hardly do to have the two pronounced the same way given the importance of ratio in math. So even if we wanted to adopt the Greek pronunciation, we probably wouldn't because of the confusion it would generate.
Just a wild guess, but perhaps it's part of a vowel shift either in modern Greek, or modern English.
I know UK (bee-ta) and USA (bay-ta) pronounce Beta differently but am slightly ashamed to say I don't know how modern Greeks pronounce it. I understand it's derived from Hebrew's Beth, though?
"In Ancient Greek, beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive /b/. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiodental fricative /v/."
For centuries, and probably still today, the language taught at school was Ancient Greek -- that's where I learnt the pronunciations. I don't know if pi had a similar change in Greek pronunciation.
Absolutely. There are a ton of loan words in Russian that suddenly become available to you when you learn to read Cyrillic. Important words, like
ресторан and бар (restaurant and bar).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script