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mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5930 days ago
1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish
| Message 113 of 351 03 December 2009 at 2:28am | IP Logged |
doviende wrote:
What I find to be an interesting property of Esperanto, is that all the rules work in all cases. Everything you learn can be generalized with your intuition. This is in heavy contrast to every other language I've seen.
As you grow up, and learn to speak your native language, you are fed a constant stream of corrections. In English, maybe you say "foots" instead of "feet", "taked" instead of "took", etc. This is because you've observed some patterns in how people talk, but then you keep running into all these weird exceptions as you learn.
In Esperanto, however, there are none of these. As soon as you grasp a pattern, you can generalize and it always works. This means that you have the ability to bypass one of the things that takes the longest to learn, and one of the things that will keep "good" speakers of a language from sounding like "native" speakers of the language. You will quickly build up your Esperanto-intuition, and you'll be able to rely on it perfectly...
Piron describes this in terms of "first degree reflexes" and "second degree reflexes". In the first degree reflexes, you figure out a pattern and start generalizing it. The second degree, however, is where you have to actively suppress all those words that are exceptions to the first rules (foots, taked, etc). Esperanto has none of these, so you can flow freely through the language purely on first degree reflexes.
here's a quote:
Claude Piron wrote:
| In English, you can't generalize the pattern in he loves / his love, he falls / his fall and say he lives / his live; he sells / his sell; he suggests / his suggest. You have to learn separately life, sale, suggestion. In Esperanto you don't hesitate: li amas / lia amo; li falas / lia falo; li vivas / lia vivo; li vendas / lia vendo; li sugestas / lia sugesto. What is a gain for memory at the time of learning-which means more time available for other pursuits - represents also an important saving of nervous energy at the time of expressing oneself. To speak fluently is to speak by reflex. If you have to constantly scan your memory for the right word or the right grammar rule, you have no fluency. A language without any second degree reflex to input into the nervous system in order to inhibit the first level reflexes is a language you can speak with much more ease than a language which doesn't have that advantage. It is also a language in which real fluency can be attained in much less time. Esperanto is such a language. |
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This is very interesting imformation. I will also add that it's good to read an actual explanation of some of the features that make Esperanto easy to learn.
Edited by mick33 on 03 December 2009 at 2:30am
1 person has voted this message useful
| Hoogamagoo
Diglot
Newbie
United States
Joined 6557 days ago
14 posts - 70 votes
Speaks: English*, Esperanto
| Message 114 of 351 03 December 2009 at 7:57am | IP Logged |
Tombstone wrote:
Volte wrote:
Tombstone wrote:
"It takes less time and effort" is an opinion statement.
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No, it really isn't.
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-- Excellent.
And where might I find the unbiased documentation supporting this non-opinion statement.
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Quote:
"Numerous studies since the 1920s have confirmed that learning Esperanto improves the motivation of learners (because of their relatively rapid progress in the language) and improves subsequent learning of other languages. The first documented experiment was in England - Bishop Auckland, 1918-21; later studies, each concentrating on different aspects of the question, but coming to broadly similar conclusions, have been conducted in New Zealand (1924), New York (1931), Manchester (1948-'65), Sheffield (1951), Finland (1963), Hungary (1970), Germany (1980), 5 European countries (1990), Italy (1993) and Australia (2000). The 1931 work was by a team led by the eminent educational psychologist, Edward Thorndike of Columbia University. The plain facts are that young people enjoy learning Esperanto; they learn it up to 5 times more quickly than other languages and the skills learned are readily transferable."
David Kelso - a former HM Chief Inspector of Schools,
Trustee and Director for Education of Esperanto-UK
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You might enjoy this document:
Springboard to Languages Rationale
Some highlights are:
Quote:
Many experiments have been conducted to discover how easily Esperanto can be learned,
beginning with the pioneering work of Thorndike (1933). Without exception, the conclusions have been positive. The only question remaining today is how easy Esperanto is to learn relative to the various mother tongues of different students (Nagata & Corsetti 2005).
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and
Quote:
Another important factor in the acquisition of a third language is "linguistic distance." It is likely that a learner will find it easier to master a third language that is typologically close to their second.
Linguistic distance can only be defined in relative terms: some language pairs are mutually closer or more distant than others.
It must also be analysed at various linguistic levels: phonological, lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic. For example, English is typologically a Germanic language, but historical events have produced a large number of loan-words from Latin and the Romance languages.
Similarly, Esperanto has a linguistic structure that contains elements of all language
groups (Wells 1989) and a lexicon drawn mainly from Romance and Germanic.
For an English-speaking child, the propaedeutic effect derived from Esperanto therefore
applies (at least at the morphological level) to all Indo-European languages that are more conservative than English – that is: to all such languages with the possible exception of Persian. It can even assist the learning of languages as distant as the Slavic languages, or Urdu or Hindi. On the other hand, at the lexical level, help with learning Romance or Germanic languages is more apparent.
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Oh yes, and about these studies...
Quote:
The first documented field study was made at the Girls’ County School, Bishop Auckland,
UK, from 1918–21, under the supervision of HM Inspectors of Schools. Since then, major
studies have included:
1920 Green Lane School, Eccles, UK
1922 League of Nations Official Enquiry, Geneva, Switzerland
1922–24 Bishop’s Elementary School, Auckland, New Zealand
1924 Wellesley College, Ohio, USA
1925–31 Columbia University, New York, USA (Prof. E. Thorndike)
1934–35 Public High School, New York, USA
1947–51 County Grammar School, Sheffield, UK (University of Sheffield)
1948–61 Egerton Park School, Manchester, UK
1950–63 Somero, Finland (Ministry of Education)
1962–63 Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary (Prof. I. Szerdahelyi)
1971–74 22 classes from Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria
1972–73 Scuola Elementare Dante, Forlì, Italy (Ministry of Education)
1975–77 300 pupils from Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Netherlands
1977–83 University of Paderborn, Germany (Prof. H. Frank)
1983–88 Scuola Media, San Salvatore di Cogorno, Italy
1993 Official Report: Ministry of Education, Italy
1994–97 Monash University, Victoria, Australia (Prof. A. Bishop)
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Oh, and this is interesting too...
Ekparoli
Here's a highlight from that one (LOTE=Language Other Than English - an educational proposal from the State of Victoria):
Quote:
From the purely research perspective there is every reason for governments, primary school principals and teachers, and parents to look very seriously at these results which show the potential benefits to the students of early Esperanto study in the primary school. We all learn a second language in a different way from the way we learn our first language, and if the government policy of requiring LOTE study in primary schools is to succeed, then the choice of that first LOTE is crucial. It is likely that with parental choice of schools becoming more and more influential, the majority of primary school leavers will progress to a secondary school which will be teaching a different LOTE from the one they studied in primary school.
Thus one should be choosing a first LOTE
* in which the children will gain early success
* which they will enjoy learning
* which will show them how important LOTE study is
* and which will prepare them successfully for later LOTE study
According to the research in the EKPAROLI project, Esperanto meets all these criteria better than the other languages in the study.
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your move...
Edited by Hoogamagoo on 03 December 2009 at 7:58am
8 persons have voted this message useful
| doviende
Diglot
Senior Member
Canada
languagefixatio
Joined 5992 days ago
533 posts - 1245 votes
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese
| Message 115 of 351 03 December 2009 at 8:41am | IP Logged |
wow, those are some interesting documents. thanks for the links.
I particularly enjoyed this quote from the first:
Springboard Document wrote:
For example, a study in Germany in the 1970s concentrated on the learning effect that
Esperanto had on German children learning English. The study found a gain of 30% in
standardised tests when compared with the progress of children who had not previously
studied Esperanto; in terms of a five-year course, this is equivalent to a gain of a year and a half. |
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So the kids spent one less year studying English because they studied Esperanto first instead. At the end, despite spending *less* time on English, they were 30% ahead of their peers that only studied English. That's an amazing result.
2 persons have 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 116 of 351 03 December 2009 at 9:26am | IP Logged |
doviende wrote:
| So the kids spent one less year studying English because they studied Esperanto first instead. At the end, despite spending *less* time on English, they were 30% ahead of their peers that only studied English. That's an amazing result. |
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It certainly is - and it's been repeated in quite a number of studies over the years now. It gives another angle on the original question of whether learning Esperanto's a waste of time. If you're not particularly gifted with languages, you might actually make more progress with your chosen language if you spend six months on Esperanto first!
3 persons have voted this message useful
| Sprachprofi
Nonaglot
Senior Member
Germany
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| Message 117 of 351 03 December 2009 at 11:12am | IP Logged |
Mick, some other features that make Esperanto objectively easier:
- no noun genders, the definite article "la" is used for all and there is no indefinite one.
- conjugation: -as for all forms of the present tense, -is for all forms of the past tense (no distinction between simple past, perfect and progressive forms either), -os for all forms of the future, -us for conditional, -u for imperative & subjunctive. This applies to all verbs.
- one often-cited difficulty is that you have to add the ending -n to the object of a sentence if it doesn't follow a preposition (Accusative case). This is already offset by not having to learn the forms "me", "him", "her", "us" and "them" however, as personal pronouns also just add -n.
- no distinction between Accusative and Dative; a major difficulty for advanced learners of Romance languages (telephoner quelqu'un or telephone A quelqu'un?).
- free word order.
- each preposition has only one clearly-defined use. You will be able to confidently predict which preposition is right while English prepositions are mostly learned by exposure, with fluent speakers still making mistakes.
- knowing 500 word roots you can express yourself as well as with a vocabulary of 3000-5000 English word roots due to the easy conversion of word types plus the extensive affix system (great advantage for people who learn Esperanto as a first Indo-European language).
The entire grammar of Esperanto can be summarized on a folded A4-size leaflet, such as the German Esperanto Association often gives out. The biggest advantages though are the regularity, which doviende already mentioned, and the notion that Esperanto becomes your language once you speak it. That is, you can play with it, you can invent new ways of expressing something; as long as it is grammatical and understandable, nobody can tell you "We don't say it that way". In my opinion, "We don't say it that way" is the most frustrating thing for an advanced learner to hear. It means that you did everything right and yet native speakers can laugh at you.
Edited by Sprachprofi on 03 December 2009 at 11:16am
4 persons have voted this message useful
| Lizzern
Diglot
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Norway
Joined 5915 days ago
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Speaks: Norwegian*, English
Studies: Japanese
| Message 118 of 351 03 December 2009 at 11:27am | IP Logged |
Sprachprofi wrote:
| In my opinion, "We don't say it that way" is the most frustrating thing for an advanced learner to hear. It means that you did everything right and yet native speakers can laugh at you. |
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If you're told "We don't say it that way", that means you did NOT do everything right. It means you either said something flat out wrong thinking that was the correct form of expression, or you said something wrong because you simply never picked up the right way of saying things. This is not inherently problematic - it just means that every learner needs to learn to speak the language the way natives do. Nothing new about that. Imo this is certainly manageable enough as long as we study the language as it is used by its native speakers and do what they do (when in Rome...), I imagine there'd be room for confusion if anyone could innovate freely. The only people I find truly difficult to listen to are the people who neglected to teach themselves the proper forms of expression and speak a pseudo-form of the language largely based on assumptions and structures from their own native language - and this is a real problem with some people.
2 persons have voted this message useful
| doviende
Diglot
Senior Member
Canada
languagefixatio
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Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese
| Message 119 of 351 03 December 2009 at 11:49am | IP Logged |
Actually, I commonly help my coworkers with those sorts of "we don't say it that way" expressions in English, and usually they've said something that is actually grammatically correct. It just sounds "old" or "weird" or something like that. It's hard to put my finger on it.
I had one guy ask me why he couldn't say a certain phrase (which I can't remember right now), but I had to tell him it was a correct phrase, but it made him sound like he teleported from the 1940s. I couldn't say why, but it reminded me of something from old black-and-white movies, so I told him a "better" way to say it.
Grammar just describes the space of utterances that are "correct", but not which ones are in use, which is usually unexplainable. There's usually no pattern, you just have to memorize a series of exceptions, which is a further limit on top of the "correctness" limit of the grammar.
2 persons have voted this message useful
| Captain Haddock
Diglot
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| Message 120 of 351 03 December 2009 at 11:50am | IP Logged |
Lizzern wrote:
If you're told "We don't say it that way", that means you did NOT do everything right. It means you either said
something flat out wrong thinking that was the correct form of expression, or you said something wrong because
you simply never picked up the right way of saying things. This is not inherently problematic - it just means that
every learner needs to learn to speak the language the way natives do. Nothing new about that. |
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I think Esperanto would face this problem if it ever became successful enough to produce a substantial number of
native speakers. The nativization/creolization process would undoubtedly result in preferred ways of saying things,
and Esperanto would develop along the lines of a natural language with all the complexities and irregularities that
entails.
2 persons have voted this message useful
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