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Esperanto a waste of time? | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5527 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes  Speaks: Swedish* | Message 201 of 351 18 January 2010 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Well, the debate is not really about whether Esperanto is easy to learn or not, I'm sure it is. The main argument against learning it is that it is pretty useless from a practical point of view, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5872 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 202 of 351 18 January 2010 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
As I said, this Esperanto attitude is one of its biggest problems. All natural languages change and evolve. Why does Esperanto believe it is already perfect? I think many historians will confirm that things that refused to change didn't survive. I'm sure Charles Darwin would agree. Think about 'natural selection' and 'survival of the fittest'. If Esperanto continues with its current rigid attitudes, it could well be a candidate for the Darwin Awards.
Another description of that might be 'inbreeding'. Earlier in this thread, I talked about this lack of 'daily media'. You provided me with the following news link: http://www.eventeo.net/web/ I tried to convince myself that this link was a good source of news, but failed. On that site today, the news about the earthquake in Haiti is 4 days old. I still believe that many people who might otherwise get excited about Esperanto are deterred by its perceived 'static' nature, and the lack of dynamic daily world news is a big contributor to that perception. These comments are by someone (me) who seriously studied Esperanto in the past and wants to study Esperanto now. I imagine that it is not very appealing to many of those considering studying a new language. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6476 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 203 of 351 18 January 2010 at 7:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Where did I claim that languages shouldn't change and evolve? I said quite the opposite. I am against artificial changes, but fully in favour of language evolution. This is my stance no matter if we're talking about Esperanto and the eternal reformist discussion or French and the Académie Francaise's attempts at telling people how to speak.
??? Hardly.
What do you see on the front page of CNN, BBC, Welt and Le Monde? News about the Haiti earthquake. OMG, they are so static! It is customary at CNN and other 24h news network sites to write a dozen articles based on the same information, with maybe one fact changing between them. The titles change to make you think that they have all new information, they sometimes re-phrase a paragraph, sometimes not, but basically you have to wade through 90% of yesterday's information to find the 10% (optimistically!) of information they gathered today on the issue. EventEo on the other hand adopts a wiki-style approach, so that the articles improve and become more complete over time, while not flooding the web with the same article under a dozen different headers. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5872 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 204 of 351 18 January 2010 at 8:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
OK. I now understand your position on that issue.
I read the news daily in several languages. I agree that not everyone is so interested in 'today's' news, but millions and billions are. Far fewer want to read four-day-old news. And reading fresh daily news is an excellent language learning tool. One of the strengths of reading the news in several language is that they support each other in terms of knowing the situation, the story and the words. Again, all major languages have tons of 'daily' news. I like the Esperanto Wikipedia, as I like all the Wikipedias I use. It is probably the most useful Esperanto site. I'd be very interested in learning about any more-dynamic Esperanto sites that are out there, especially daily news. A major disappointment is that Google Translate doesn't support Esperanto. I wonder if Google is planning to add Esperanto? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Reisender Triglot Newbie Italy Joined 5457 days ago 30 posts - 44 votes Speaks: German*, English, Italian Studies: Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek, French | Message 205 of 351 18 January 2010 at 8:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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In the most recent discussion in this thread, some people repeatedly stated that English was some kind of dominating, globally spoken lingua franca. I'm not d'accord with this assumption. Why this might be the case for northern America and northern Europe, it certainly is not for southern europe. I don't know much about the situation in other parts of the world, but i higly doubt that there are many south-american, african or asian countries where the majority of the people is able to speak English on an advanced level.
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| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5454 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 206 of 351 18 January 2010 at 8:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
and learning Esperanto is a bad hobby? :) (since you say that there are worse...) One thing I don't understand (and which is mentioned on this topic many times and also on some other topics here) - why criteria for learning a language must be its usefulness? What about learning dead languages? Or those spoken only by a small number of people, in parts of the world you are never going to live in or even visit? Are you putting the same argument for these languages? I learn languages because I love languages. simply as that. not because I will need them in a future. I got interested in Russian and Spanish because of poetry, not because of their potential usefulness in my life. I got interested in Arabic and Mandarin solely because they are so different from languages I've been familiar with so far + there are enough resources for learning...A month ago I heard a poem recorded in Esperanto. That was the first time I've heard spoken Esperanto and since then I love it! it sounds incredibly pleasing to my ear. I have to learn a language in which poetry sounds like that :). What exactly is bad in that? I do not like the whole political (or call it however you want) thing behind Esperanto. I'm just annoyed by the attitude some people have towards anyone who wants to learn Esperanto...(to be precise - I am annoyed by a question "Why would you learn that language?!", no matter which language we are talking about.) 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Reisender Triglot Newbie Italy Joined 5457 days ago 30 posts - 44 votes Speaks: German*, English, Italian Studies: Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek, French | Message 207 of 351 18 January 2010 at 8:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Well, learning dead languages like ancient Greek or Latin is pretty useful if you're interested in philosophy or dramatics. By the way: Do you remember the name and the author of the poem you talked about? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| davidwelsh Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5535 days ago 141 posts - 307 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, Norwegian, Esperanto, Swedish, Danish, French Studies: Polish, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, Mandarin | Message 208 of 351 18 January 2010 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I think that's an important point, and it's worth distinguishing between those who learn Esperanto primarily for what they can get out of it as it is today and those who have a more idealistic motivation. Personally, I learned Esperanto for the same reason I learned Norwegian, and the same reason I'm currently studying Finnish, Catalan and Northern Sámi. I don't study languages I think will be useful to me, I study languages that appeal to me aesthetically. I started studying Esperanto out of curiosity and continued because I think it's an incredibly beautiful language, I find the speed with which I can make progress exhilerating, and I love the extent to which I can be creative and playful when using it actively. Becoming an Esperantist has though made me more aware of language politics, and led me to reflect on the unfairness and illogicality of the language situation we have today. I'm glad that by learning and using Esperanto, as well as writing in it, translating into it and teaching it I can help Esperanto become richer and stronger as a language, in the hope that it will become more widespread in the future. I personally don't find the accusation of being an "idealist" or "utopian" or "unrealistic" to be particularly troubling. Plenty of changes have occurred in human society much more radical than the adoption of an international auxiliary language, and those who have promoted radical change have often been ridiculed and dismissed as utopian and unrealistic until, all of a sudden, everyone decides that they actually maybe had a point after all. The adoption of Arabic numbers is a good example. They are clearly a vast improvement on Roman numerals, but it took hundreds of years for them to be adopted. It wouldn't actually take all that much for Esperanto to gain a lot of ground. If a rising economic power like China or Brazil decided that actually it was going to be a lot cheaper for them to teach their citizens Esperanto rather than English, and anyone that wanted to trade with them could either learn Esperanto or Portuguese or Chinese, then suddenly things would look quite different. The fact is that the adoption of Esperanto for international communication would be in a lot of countries' economic interests, which means I don't think it's entirely outwith the realms of possibility. Supporting a good idea that would help make the world a fairer place may well be unrealistic or utopian, but it's at least as respectable and useful a way to spend one's time as learning Finnish because you happen to think it's beautiful, and I think describing such endeavours as a waste of time is going a bit far. Edited by davidwelsh on 18 January 2010 at 9:02pm 7 persons have voted this message useful |
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