Yeah, we always say that the English alphabet has 26 letters, but there are actually 52 unique symbols you have to learn to read, or 104 if you also have to read/write cursive. Some of these symbols are very similar (if you learn 'o' you will definitely recognize 'O', and likely the cursive variants as well), while others are quite different ('g', 'G', and the cursive upper case G might as well be different letters altogether; the lower-case cursive does resemble 'g').
With joined-up letters (“cursive” in the USA I guess) different languages have different letterforms, and sometimes multiple systems.
For that matter typesetting rules vary by language as well — not just the obvious hyphenation rules busnspacimg as well. Just pick up a book in, say, French or Russian and you can tell at a glance (without even looking at the letters) that it’s not in English.
Right, 104 symbols would be the minimum if you do need to read/write cursive.
However, I don't agree with your point about typeset text. You're right that the styles differ, but if you have learned one style, and know the language of the text, you will not need any significant amount of time to read a different style of typesetting.
Russian of course normally uses the Cyrillic alphabet, not the Latin one, so obviously you do have to learn a whole new set of symbols to understand it even if you can read Latin symbols. And of course French uses slightly more letters/letter forms than English, with the sedile and four accents (egu, grave, circonflex, and very rare treme).
Lots of accents when using Cyrillic to write non-Russian text.
I didn’t mean the typesetting differences made reading a different language in any way hard, merely pointing out that there are lots of different aspects to text in different languages even when the alphabets are basically the same.
