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Michael K.’s Esperanto log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5735 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 1 of 74 26 February 2011 at 4:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I've decided that I want to learn Esperanto. Actually, I've decided I was interested in Esperanto back in November 2009, but have been going back and forth without a commitment since then, since I don't know how useful it would be. I originally wanted to study it because it sounded easy, and I wanted to try an IAL since I like the idea behind them (have one language that everyone has to learn). I've decided to go for it anyhow. Yes, I should be focusing on Spanish, especially since I actually have the opportunity to use it locally while with Esperanto I would have to travel a long way, to Pittsburgh or Columbus, to use it with people in real life (as opposed to online).
I want to say a few things about IALs. I really started to think about them due to my favorite blog, pagef30.com, and a blog that that one wrote about a few times, joyoflanguages.blogspot.com. Robert Winter, the author of "joy," originally had the goal of writing novels in an IAL, but has since abandoned that goal. Both bloggers wrote about IALs extensively and have tried to learn Esperanto and other IALs. Neither blogger likes Esperanto all that much. With that in mind, Esperanto might not be the best IAL, but it is the most successful one to date. I might even try other IALs later, but none of them have the free resources or clout that Esperanto has. Ido, an offshoot of Esperanto, has a free e-book to learn the language, but it is very difficult to gather more than 12 Idists in one place. Another IAL I'm keeping my eye on is Sambahsa, but it looks fairly difficult. Both bloggers think Sambahsa has potential. I should also point out that I hate the politics of Esperanto, and can see why some people are turned off by the politics. It's a shame people hate the language when they've never even tried it. Like I said, I want to keep an open mind and not just say Esperanto is the best IAL out there. I really think that unless a government or some other entity with lots of money to spend on solving the "language problem" that IALs will only really be a hobbyists' obsession, although some IALs are being used to solve problems. I guess it's easy to be bipolar when it comes to IALs: one day, you think it's a great idea and wonder why so few people support the idea, and a short time later feel like you're wasting your time with it and should learn a "real" language. I bought two Esperanto books about a year ago, and around Christmas 2009 I signed up for a correspondence course, although I just printed off the first lesson and never did it. I really haven't used any of the books, and October 2010 I signed up for lernu and have looked it over a little bit, but haven't really used it extensively until this week. The past few days I have been using the course Bildoj kaj Demandoj (pictures and questions) since it was recommended in the welcome e-mail sent to me by lernu. I really like the course and have had a lot of fun doing it, and I think it will serve as a good introduction to the language. I have also completed a few lessons of La puzlo Esperanto (the Esperanto puzzle, which is fun) and Vojagxu kun Zam (Travel with Zam, the lernu mascot), the other two beginning courses. I have also downloaded the audio to Mi estas komencanto and completed a few of the interactive exercises. I guess my goal right now is to complete all the courses on lernu and start reading and chatting online. I have a time limit now. In May, I'll start working full-time in a warehouse and I don't know when I'll have the time or privacy and quiet (since I'll be living with 3 other people) to study. I will then have to wait until the middle of August when I come home, but then I'll have to go back to school with four classes and my priorities will be completely different than this semester, since I only have one class. Well, I think I've gotten completely carried away with wanting to learn these languages. It's not that I don't have time right now, it's that I may not have time in the future to pursue languages like I would like to. Far be it from me to be an Esperanto missionary, but if you are even the least bit curious about the language, sign up for lernu.net and go through some of the exercises in the basic courses when you have some free time. At least then if you hate the language, you'll know why you hate it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6445 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 74 26 February 2011 at 5:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Good luck, and have fun!
I'm a little puzzled about what you mean about Esperanto politics - it's a phrase I hear a lot, but usually from people who don't speak Esperanto, and who seem to mean a variety of different things by it. What does it mean to you? If you set out to design an ideal language, Esperanto wouldn't be it - neither would any other language I've seen, though. This doesn't mean much in practice, though some people find it fun to think about and discuss. Esperanto is not a "hobbyist's obsession"; neither will it solve all the world's problems. It's a lot like every other language in living use in that regard. Esperanto is definitely an 'easier' language. I'm hesitant to call it easy, since actively learning to use it well takes some work, but the estimates I've seen of it taking 10 times less time to get to comparable levels in Esperanto vs in other European languages seem plausible to me. There are still plenty of people who have study it a little and can't speak it, though - it does take work. Study well. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5735 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 3 of 74 26 March 2011 at 3:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Thanks, Volte, for your response. I also appreciate your fair and balanced view of Esperanto.
I'm sorry I took so long to respond to your post. One month is unacceptable in responding to a post. Once again, sorry. I'll write a more detailed response in a day or two, since I'm still organizing my thoughts on how to respond to everything in your post. I don't know why I made that mention about it (IALs, not Esperanto specifically) being a hobbyist's obsession, other than it seemed like a good idea at the time, LOL. I've also learned since that post that it is a bad idea to call anybody's language, even if it is an IAL, easy. It seems to get them angry, since it implies they aren't very sophisticated. When I called Esperanto easy, I certainly didn't mean it would be easy in the same way some junior high and high school classes were, meaning I could get an A without really trying. I never meant to imply I could learn the language without any effort, just that there would be no real need to memorize verb conjugations like in Spanish. If I'm not mistaking, every verb in Esperanto is conjugated by -as for the present tense, -os for future, and -is for the past, and there are no irregular verbs in Esperanto. All you need to do now is learn the hundreds of verbs that describe your actions, the actions of other people, and the actions of other things and you can have a basic conversation about what someone or something did, is doing, or will do. To me, that's easy. Probably the hardest thing is the -n ending, but a helpful person on another forum wrote: 1) does the word refer to the subject? 2) does the word come after a prepostion? If those two are answered no, add -n. Seems easy enough. I'll try to write more about politics and my own motivations for learning Esperanto in a day or two. ***** As far as a log goes, I really haven't done much with any language since about the end of February. I have a second wind now, so I'll try to get back into lernu and get my activity level up again. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5699 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 4 of 74 26 March 2011 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Hey Michael, I really like your first post in this thread. It's impressive to me because it's one of the few comments I've seen about Esperanto which isn't blindly opinionated and clearly reflecting a bias either for or against the language. I agree with pretty much everything you said, and I'll be very interested to hear how you progress with Eo! Bonan ŝancon!
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6445 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 74 31 March 2011 at 12:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
It's perfectly acceptable; don't worry.
"Easy" doesn't make me angry, and it certainly doesn't imply a lack of sophistication to me. It's just a word that I find leads to misconceptions (and demotivation - if someone hears a language is easy, they tend to get discouraged about the rate of their progress and their ability, as far as I've seen).
Verbs are much easier in Esperanto than in Spanish, though they're a little more complicated than that. There's also -u and -us ("Bonvolu..." is 'please', and -us is the conditional, for instance in "Se mi farus tion..." - 'if I were to do that...'). There are also the participles: -it-/-int-, -at-/ant-, -ot-/-ont-, though you can ignore them at first. Eventually, though, phrases like "li estos veninta" ('he will have come') will be useful to you, though. You can perfectly correctly say "li venos" ('he will come'), but being able to add the extra shade of detail is nice. There are also a few things which will surprise your intuitions at first; for instance, to say "I miss her", you'd say "ŝi mankas al mi" (literally, 'She lacks to me') - a pattern used in several Romance languages, but not in English. The upside of all this is a lot of expressive power, a system which is still entirely regular (and with very few endings, which don't change for person), and a significant advantage in learning the verb system of other languages, especially Romance onces.
Well, for the -n ending as an accusative, that's reasonable. Slightly confusingly, that's not the only use of it though. "Mi promenas en la ĉambro" is "I walk around inside the room", while "Mi promenas en la ĉambron" is "I walk into the room" - but you can ignore this use for now. Just be aware that it exists when you start reading real texts, so you don't get confused.
Good luck. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 74 31 March 2011 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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The thing that has bothered me most in the grammar of Esperanto is that there isn't a cmpound perfect (like "I have done"), you have to say something corresponding to "I did". But every language has its quirks, and without those quirks it would lose its 'personality'.
Another problem is the use of letters with diacritics. Some use an ortography where letter pairs with an x are used instead of the 'complicated' letters - but I don't find that this is an aesthetically pleasing solution. And finally you have to search hard for interesting content, especially spoken sources. But it can be found, and this is also a problem with other languages. As usual Wikipedia is a good provider of short articles, if you prefer non fiction. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5735 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 7 of 74 31 March 2011 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Thanks, Jinx, for your kind remarks. I learned a lot about IALs by reading Robert Winter's blog and Page F30. They are may main inspiration for learning IALs.
Thanks, Volte, for your responses to my misconceptions. I still have a long way to go with Esperanto. And thanks, Iversen, you seemed to have sneaked in while I was posting, LOL. Yes, probably the biggest source of frustration with IALs is the lack of written and spoken content. Which is why you have to create it. Anyway, about what I meant by Esperanto politics - I guess that's a misnomer. I guess I mean what Robert Winter describes as the "one language to rule them all" ideology. He mentions in his blog that he has found people in the Esperanto, Ido, and even the Occidental Interlingue communities that think that only one IAL should be promoted and all others should be ignored or even be encouraged to die. I prefer Mithridates', of Page F30 (who is also a member of this forum), suggestion that you should have a few favorites, actively support one by translating a lot of content into that language, and give moral support to all the others. Mithridates seems to favor Ido, Occidental Interlingue, Lingua Franca Nova, Sambahsa (once it matures), a few others, and Idiom Neutral, the last one being an IAL he tried to resurrect. Like I said earlier, he isn't particularly fond of Esperanto. I find this attitude to be preferable to the "one language to rule them all" philosophy, although I have no interest in being another Mithridates (who is a professional translator, and finds learning IALs easy, even with just a grammar and dictionary) or a Moses McCormick of IALs, although I am interested in a few other IALs in addition to Esperanto, like Occidental Interlingue. One example of the disrespect IAL proponents seem to have for each other is the fact that there is an Esperanto word for a muddled, incomprehensible mess that derives from Volapuk. Maybe it was just a smart aleck attempt by an early Esperantist, but I see that sort of thing as completely uncalled for. I don't know, maybe I'm too sensitive. These are two links which I read while writing the first post in this log, and I spent a week writing it. It helps to show my mindset back then. I was originally not going to write about politics or ideology, since I generally hate expressing my view on politics or ideology in any form, but I came to the conclusion that IALs inherently had political or ideological baggage when I read the following posts. http://www.rickharrison.com/language/farewell.html http://www.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=24438 See footnote #1 for some nasty politics. Rick Harrison's post is about as pessimistic as a person can get with regard to IALs. All the infighting really got to him. He uses the word eristic to describe IAL proponents, which seems to mean people who enjoy engaging in arguments and controversy. Also note in footnote #1 he says Idists basically want Esperanto to die and Esperantists basically want Ido to die. Needless to say, it would be very difficult to have much common ground with people in the opposing viewpoint. Three quick quotes from the Unilang forum link about Esperanto: 1) You'd think that for a group where you can find some people even frighteningly religious about Esperanto (as in they consider Zamenhof to be almost a god), people would at least make an effort to speak it correctly. 2) Things I don't like/find confusing/irritating: Ideology. There seem to be no language materials which won't go shouting "Look, it's SO great!!! Join every convention and become a disciple!!!" at you instead of just providing learning material. Generally a slightly religious feeling, and the "we poor Esperantists who are discriminated against by the mean outside world" 3) Some people can be really annoyingly enthusiastic and missionary - just keep in mind they have not been brainwashed, it's their genuine enjoyment they want to share. Another thing is that I have never met an Esperantist or IAL proponent in real life, so I could have warped views about these people. I have heard some warped stereotypes of Americans, so I can see how this would be a problem. That's about it when it comes to Esperanto and politics/ideology. If you want to know anything else, I'll be around, and I'll try to answer within a week, LOL. Please share what you were thinking about Esperanto politics, since you said it could mean a variety of things. I have four basic motivations for learning Esperanto: 1) Source of information beyond the English-speaking media. I have a passing interest in Japan, and since Esperanto is popular there, I could read information directly from a Japanese source instead of it going through a translator, and without having to learn to read Japanese. 2) To meet interesting people who like the concept of IALs, and there seem to be a lot of them out there. 3) To support the IAL movement, although I don't know which IAL I would actively support. Esperanto seems to be the best gateway to IALs at the moment since it has the most people. 4) As a confidence booster since it is a relatively easy language. Yes, of course it will take work and becoming demotivated at some of the more difficult features, as the lernu welcome letter said. It even said people might despair that they would never learn Esperanto. That's all. This log has been fun so far. ETA: Here is a section from the lernu welcome letter. Don't believe that Esperanto is very easy In our experience, learning a new language is always a challenge and never a "very easy" thing. The same is true for Esperanto, although it is clearly less difficult than national/ethnic languages normally are. Even those who have never really succeeded in learning a foreign language can learn Esperanto! But much learning and practice is necessary if you want to use the language fluently and correctly. Don't be amazed if from time to time you lose hope in ever speaking Esperanto well... However, if you are ready to make an effort for a few months, or a few years, you will definitely succeed and will then be able to enjoy the international language Esperanto in many different ways! Edited by Michael K. on 02 April 2011 at 8:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5699 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 8 of 74 31 March 2011 at 6:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I totally know what you mean – I too am disturbed by this tendency, but I suppose it pops up anywhere speakers of a particular language have been oppressed or disrespected. Since there's so much negativity directed at conlangs in general and Esperanto in particular (due to its comparative popularity), I can understand why a lot of Esperantists defend their language to the point of insulting others. I can understand it, but that doesn't mean I support it. However, with this particular example (I think the word you're thinking of is "volapukaĵo", isn't it?), I figured out a way to deal with it: I mentally put it in the same category as the English expression "It's all Greek to me!", its French counterpart "C'est du chinois!" (It's Chinese!), and the many similar expressions in various languages around the world. When we don't understand something, we tend to playfully call it by the name of some other language. I don't know if this will help you at all, but I just thought I would share it because it made my feelings about the word "volapukaĵo" change from negative to quite positive! Now I feel that the word simply adds to the Esperanto culture, because it refers to the historical rivalry between Eo and Volapük. Pretty cool. :)
This link didn't work for me, but I'd really like to read it. Do you know the name of the article, so I could perhaps Google it? Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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