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Esperanto’s benefit for language learners | ||
Tags: Esperanto | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Johntm Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5426 days ago 616 posts - 725 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 57 of 78 16 April 2010 at 5:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6476 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 58 of 78 16 April 2010 at 6:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I can't help but notice how few posts in this thread actually pertain to the topic. I may not be a moderator, but I think things would go much more smoothly for everyone if we stuck to the topic instead of getting into irrelevant squabbling over, of all things, the definition of a word (i.e., culture).
And believe me, I'm showing great restraint here. What I just said is a thousand times nicer than how I was originally going to say it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| robsolete Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5389 days ago 191 posts - 428 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 59 of 78 16 April 2010 at 4:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
First off, thank you for the incredibly thoughtful reply. It has enriched my view of the practicality of Esperanto somewhat, though I can't say it's necessarily changed my mind. It's nice to see that the conventions in Japan, China, and Korea were a relative success. But I would point out that these are a handful of outliers in a list of conventions that are almost exclusively held in Europe. I didn't count, but I would guess about 75% of the conventions are held in Europe or very close by. And I do have to admit I am skeptical of the notion that the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean congresses didn't have their numbers boosted by enthusiastic European Esperantists who wanted to take a really cool trip while representing their movement. Since Esperanto congresses to Asia are few and far between I would imagine it would be a PRETTY BIG DEAL and attract a lot of tourism, while yet another congress in Europe (yawn) every year might not provoke the same reaction. I'm not saying that there aren't any Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans there. I'm sure there are plenty. But I would guess that the percentage of Asian Esperantists at the Polish congress is going to be lower than the percentage of European Esperantists at the Korean congress. You are right though in that my observations are subjective and not thoroughly researched. If someone can really show me that Esperanto is just as or more popular in Brazil and East Asia than it is in in France and Germany (or at least is growing faster in these areas) then I'd happily retract my argument. The list of congresses just didn't do that for me, as 75% of them are in Europe. With regards to the Arabic question, I would propose that Arabic loanwords are not a huge hindrance to the Spanish, who have been using thousands of them for quite a long time. And yes, Chinese speakers would be bereft of their tones, but I would imagine that hearing familiar phoneme structures--even outside of their tonal context--would be difficult at first but would still provide more acclimation than learning an entirely European language. The idea is not to include every phonemic difficulty possible--the idea is to show respect for the major lingua francas of the world if you're trying to create a new one. Your point about European languages and colonialism is a very strong one, but I find it a bit depressing that we'd just give up on an attempt to truly internationalize an international lingua franca. I don't really wish to be lumped into the Esperanto-bashing camp here. I really can sympathize with the goal of Esperanto, I just don't believe that language itself is the right vehicle. If you want to talk about truly a truly internationalized language, Esperanto doesn't go far enough in its source material--other conlangs, though less popular, go farther ideologically. If you want to talk about the ease of learning Esperanto as a common lingua franca of the whole world, I would reply that while a much more difficult language to learn, English's unprecedented teaching infrastructure and vast array of available, free materials would supplant it (and currently is). Not to mention that the immigration to the United States by literally almost every cultural group in the world means that almost everyone has some not-so-distant relative who is an English speaker. I really feel that this sense of familiarity is what has made English actually take off worldwide, more than any sort of imperialism. The language, while challenging, is a known quantity and everyone knows it can be learned because uncle Yoshikazu/Boris/Mohammed/Carlos learned it when he emigrated to the States. Esperanto, while interesting, just doesn't have that access. And don't take that as a necessarily positive statement from me as an English native speaker--I actually fear for what too much globalization will do to the language, and the cultural identity of its speakers (i.e. while in the days of Humphrey Bogart the American accent was seen as some sort of interesting vernacular, nowadays some posters here refer to it as "boring" and "generic"). So I guess for me Esperanto holds this strange middle ground between ideological purity and practical applicability in its pursuit as a world language. But it doesn't really succeed on either count. That's not to say that anyone should be barred from studying it if they enjoy it. People can do whatever they want. But if someone makes a public post about how Esperanto is the greatest thing since sliced bread for language learners, others are perfectly entitled to disagree without just being labeled as close-minded. Anyway, thank you again for the informative and thought-out post. And I do agree that some of the anti-Esperantists are getting a bit into "ad hominem" attacks against the personalities of those attracted to Esperanto. A pretty useless thing to do with a group of 2,000,000 people from many different countries. But I do think that debating the language's claims of being an ideal universal language, in terms of the language's structure and the demographics of those who speak it, is not out of bounds. Edited by robsolete on 16 April 2010 at 5:08pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5437 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 60 of 78 16 April 2010 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Good response, robsolete.
As I've been learning about Esperanto, a lot of the evidence for its benefit in helping to learn languages is as a "primer" before starting another language. But what if someone already has a decent grasp of the basics of inflection, grammar, etc.? Does it still show benefits in future language acquisition? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 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 61 of 78 16 April 2010 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Thank you for adding some quality to the discussion, robsolete.
Since my boyfriend used to be a board member of TEJO (the international youth organization for Esperanto), I'm actually privy to some details of deciding on a location for a 'worldwide' congress (as opposed to the pan-Asian, pan-South American etc. congresses that occur every year as well), and there are other constraints rather than just the number of Esperanto speakers within driving distance. For example, they want to encourage mingling between foreign Esperanto speakers and local ones, because that's the purpose of Esperanto after all. So the location can't be one that bars out foreign tourists, nor one that is too dangerous, say a country that is undergoing a civil war or even just unrest like Thailand at the moment. And the location actually has to volunteer, meaning there have to be enough local active-minded Esperanto- speaking volunteers to host a conference. Another underestimated constraint is the availability of large enough conference centers. I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but having more than 3000 people attend the same conference is just not realistic, and the 1986 Universala Kongreso in Beijing, China with 2482 participants was actually the largest conference that Beijing had ever seen. This is the main reason why Africa hasn't been represented so far for example; conservative estimates say that there would be around 2500 African Esperanto speakers ready to meet in Togo or Ghana if the Universal Congress took place there, but there just isn't any infrastructure to accommodate such a large gathering. This is unfortunate because Africans also don't typically have the means to afford intercontinental travel to one of the worldwide meetings, so they are limited to local (still international) meetings. Of course there is a lot of tourism towards those meetings. Yet it seems from my quick calculations that there are as many people traveling inter-continentally to a European convention as there are people traveling inter-continentally to a convention in say Asia. I initially thought to use my participant's booklet for the 2006 Beijing Universala Kongreso for this purpose (I won a scholarship to study Chinese in Beijing that accidentally coincided with the time of the congress). The booklet contains participant statistics per country, which I've sorted into continents for ease of counting:
Then I needed to find similar statistics for a European meeting, and I luckily found that the Universal Esperanto Association's official website keeps these statistics. From there:
All in all, the numbers of inter-continental tourists vs. "locals" look quite comparable for Europe and Asia, so the discrepancy you mentioned does not exist. You can access detailed lists of participants by country, including names for those who didn't reject being listed, at http://uea.org/kongresoj/alighintoj.php?jaro=2009&land=jes or modify the URL for any other year. Thank you for making me look at these by the way. Having been to the Beijing congress, I knew of course that the majority were in fact Asians, and Asians without knowledge of English to boot, but looking at the statistics showed me that there is a positive development when it comes to participants from more exotic countries. For example, participant numbers from Kazakhstan, Nepal, Arab countries and so on has risen sharply since 2006. When it comes to the location of congresses, you have to take into account that this is more than 100 years of history, and Esperanto started out in Poland. It is clear that the first meetings would be in Europe before the spark caught on elsewhere. Also the difficulty of traveling internationally, something we take for granted today, has always been an impediment to having congresses outside of Europe, particularly before 1950. After all, the organizers have to travel to the conference whether it's in Madagascar or France, and so do the board members of UEA, who are expected to have their yearly general meeting during the Universala Kongreso. Yet now that it's no problem to travel, and with the iron curtain gone to boot, the statistics are changing.
Edited by Sprachprofi on 16 April 2010 at 8:54pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 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 62 of 78 16 April 2010 at 10:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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As for the rest of the points you brought up... I have a feeling we won't see eye-to-
eye on this, but I want to state my case anyway, because unlike with some of the previous posters in this thread I get the feeling that you're not opposing Esperanto for the fun of stirring up the forum but rather for some good reasons, having given due consideration what you know about the language.
Indeed, you could say that. The first priority was to make it easy to learn, because otherwise people could arguably agree on Spanish as an international language (or English, but I believe that more people natively speak or have learned a Romance languages). Anybody who tried it, including our forum member from Sri Lanka, can confirm that Esperanto can be learned in a fifth of the time necessary to learn Spanish to the same level, or even less time depending on your previous language knowledge. That's a huge time saver, especially for Asians who traditionally spend very much time learning a European language with very little success, and if it was not for a time saver of this magnitude it would be nuts to suggest a language for world language that isn't widely spoken yet. The ease does not just come from the regular grammar and the familiar word roots, but also and I believe foremost from the way you can regularly and without fail deduce up to 30 words based on the same word root, drastically limiting the amount of vocabulary you need to study (a great benefit for speakers of non- European languages in particular).
Many of the Arabic loanwords in Spanish are also present in Esperanto ;-) You have to give Zamenhof credit though because in the last 19th century he could not have imagined that Chinese, Japanese and Arabic play comparatively big roles nowadays, while Gujarati and Quechua do not. At this point Esperanto is a living language relying purely on natural evolution (with a descriptivist language academy, unlike the French one), so we can not force the inclusion of more roots from non-European languages; they will probably come anyway. If you want to design a new intauxlang because of this blemish, you could of course go the way of Lojban and generate word roots a priori in order not to advantage anyone, or you could try to include two roots from each of the world's thousands of languages (have a fight about which language the word "and" comes from). Either way you will design a language whose vocabulary is 99% alien to anyone, even assuming somebody could understand words from 20 languages. This language would definitely be rejected as an international solution on account of it being too frigging hard to learn... Alternatively, you could accept that your language will be harder for an Aymará speaker than for a Frenchman and work only with today's big languages. Then you should hope that the situation doesn't look much different 100 years from now, as it did for Esperanto. New conlangs also tend to have trouble getting traction because of the lack of literature and music (culture) in them, and the tendency of their communities to keep changing the language around or having stupid arguments as to whether a plural form is really necessary; and few people are ready to learn a conlang that is still subject to radical change like that. Both of these are hurdles that Esperanto already took, actually Esperanto is the only conlang to take these hurdles, and I don't expect to see others following, despite (or because of?) the amount of conlangers today. JRR Tolkien, the grandfather of conlangers, was the first to recommend
source & longer quote
I must say I am unaware of this. Yes English teachers are easier to come by if you have the money, but I have yet to see good free classes or courses. Online for example, there are very good comprehensive free courses for German, Japanese and even Modern Greek, but I have yet to see a similar offering for English. By contrast, Lernu.net with its 12 free multimedia Esperanto courses and free tutors can be a model to any language; in fact its creators were just hired to create an equivalent for Slovakian. ... I am also unable to think of anybody among my family or friends, even net friends, who emigrated to the USA, so I think you may be over-estimating that influence. Now to answer dmaddock1...
I am unaware of any studies to this regard, though there should be some, it's not something I have looked into. I would say yes. In small part because of the motivational factor, and because it's likely that Esperanto will be the first foreign language you speak fluently and free of your native language's way of thinking. And in a larger part, because of the way you can form words, which almost reminds me of agglutinative languages. This has helped me understand Chinese and Arabic and Greek words, not just in the way they were formed but also sometimes in the meaning. If something can't be translated (without a lengthy explanation) to English, chances are still good that you can express it in Esperanto because of this very feature, and I also love the way it allows me to express things the way my mind thinks of them - often it feels like one layer of translation is gone. Edited by Sprachprofi on 16 April 2010 at 11:07pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5437 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 63 of 78 17 April 2010 at 2:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Now this is very interesting. I've read similar sentiments before, most recently by remush in this thread, but without understanding that it went beyond personal preference. Being rather well-read in English, it hadn't occurred to me that there were aspects of English which might make it unsuitable for a good translation of certain works, regardless of the strength of my native tongue. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Johntm Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5426 days ago 616 posts - 725 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 64 of 78 17 April 2010 at 5:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
1 person has voted this message useful |
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