Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

Phonetic Script
A language that doesn’t use the same written alphabet as the one you are
reading now can seem very intimidating. However, languages like Arabic,
Russian, Korean, Greek, Thai, and others that use a phonetic script essentially
require that you learn only a small set of characters, which represent particular
sounds, and doing so will allow you to read that language as you would read
any western European language.
Using a familiar writing system (as with many European languages) tends
to make us biased toward pronouncing all words the way we would in our
mother tongue. This is one reason we hang on to bad pronunciations longer
than we should. This won’t be a problem for you with phonetic languages,
because you’ll learn a new sound correctly from the start without any bias.
As with any language, I like to use a little association (which is as visual as
possible) when doing this. After a few examples, you’ll see what I mean and
you can continue this process to apply associations to your target language’s
script.
For instance, this is the Thai character that represents the ah sound:
It doesn’t look anything like a European a, but I got a great suggestion
from polyglot Stu Jay Raj when I was learning Thai. He suggested that you
imagine a man peeing against a tree; the path that his pee takes represents that
of this letter, and the sound he makes on relieving himself is of course aaaaah.
This is a visual story that is easy to remember and associate with the character.
I generally go for more graphic or silly images like this to help me remember
new letters.
Next, this is the Arabic letter that represents the b sound: 

---

Rather than a complex visual image, all I had to remember was that the dot
was below the line. Below has the b sound—problem solved!
In the same way, is the t sound because there are two dots above the
line, and is the th sound because there are three dots. For other letters, you
have to get more visual, though. So with I imagined a mouse with his tail
hanging loose or connecting to the next letter, since this is the m sound.
All it really takes is one afternoon of sitting down with a new alphabet in
front of you and thinking of things that help you visually recognize each
character. It might take a few hours to go through the entire alphabet, but this
will be time very well invested. You require that visual association at first
while you read, and this certainly slows you down, but you get used to it and
eventually know what the sound is instantly. Then you can discard the visual
association, like you would training wheels on a bike.
Memrise.com can be a useful resource here, as it has mnemonics prepared
for various alphabets.