being able to read the arabic and japanese alphabets without very much vocabularly is surprisingly useful - just being able to sound out familiar words comes in handy. wondering if i should learn more alphabets even without the rest of the language
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in reply to @stu's post:
a small nitpick from an armchair linguist: those are actually called writing systems. an alphabet is specifically a writing system that assigns symbols to all phonemes, i.e. both consonants and vowels.
the arabic writing system is an impure abjad. abjads only contain consonants. the arabic script is then called impure, because vowels are marked diacritically (i think, i dont actually speak arabic)
the particular japanese writing system I think you're referring to, katakana, is called a syllabary because each (well, most) symbol represents a syllable instead of a single phoneme
tl;dr: ummm ackschtually its called [extremely minor taxonomical differences]
as a descriptivist, i'm comfortable saying that alphabet is a commonly accepted word outside of the particular field of linguistics, but sure
in arabic vowels are optionally marked diacritcially, but typically not marked in the places you'd want to read arabic as a non-native speaker with casual exposure such as signs and internet posts
japanese has two syllabaries - hiragana and katakana, as well as a set of logograms called kanji