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How easy is Esperanto really? | ||
Tags: Esperanto | Difficulty | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| jean-luc Senior Member France Joined 4958 days ago 100 posts - 150 votes  Speaks: French* Studies: German | Message 33 of 40 23 October 2011 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
All these one + millions of native speakers. Edited by jean-luc on 23 October 2011 at 8:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| jean-luc Senior Member France Joined 4958 days ago 100 posts - 150 votes Speaks: French* Studies: German | Message 34 of 40 23 October 2011 at 8:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
It works here because you mark the case with I (with become "me" when is object) but if not for that you would not discriminate I help the girls from The girls help I out of context. Which may be enough in real life but the choice of esperanto was different. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| jean-luc Senior Member France Joined 4958 days ago 100 posts - 150 votes Speaks: French* Studies: German | Message 35 of 40 23 October 2011 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
When I see a thread on a non-linguistic forum about esperanto, there is usually several people commenting badly about the language. I never seen that for any other language.
Good to know. As beginner, I was a bit worried to not have a reference for the future.
I disagree here. You have either native speakers or dictionaries. Of course there is some disagreement for some words but only on the fringes. I've never heard someone saying about a french dictionary "it's a good dictionary but it has too many Anglicism".
I can talk only for french. There is often debate for the inclusion of this or this loaned word. But only for new words and very few of them compared to the bulk of the language, not the kind of words I found in this review of la bona lingvo :
As a beginner, it makes me wonder if I have to learn all these words if they are not considered good. I finally don't know what's good or not if even words like monochrome are not fixed. But my main concern is to know if it's finally so easy to learn the vocabulary. It's advertised to be a little number of root + the combination of these roots, but when I read the quote below, I start to wonder if I don't have to learn a lot of synonyms also. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5064 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish | Message 36 of 40 23 October 2011 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
I never suggested anything; I just find it rather odd that a language claiming to be universal would rely so heavily on cases and not at all on verb conjugation for person or number!
Not necessarily, it works just as well if I replace I with John or a name not marked for a declension. Edited by Kartof on 24 October 2011 at 2:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Enriquee Triglot Groupie United States esperantofre.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5333 days ago 51 posts - 125 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Esperanto, English | Message 37 of 40 24 October 2011 at 1:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Maybe I didn't understand your point. I thought you were talking about trusting your sources. These dictionaries have different spellings and different pronunciations for many words, and even some extra or different meanings for a given word. I also believe that many of those millions of native speakers aren't good spellers. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 38 of 40 24 October 2011 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Bizarre criticism happens, but it's a lot more common online than face to face. The majority of people I mention Esperanto to offline either don't care, or are mildly curious. A small minority originally ask "isn't it dead?" or similar, and then are pretty much like the rest, in not caring or being mildly curious.
PIV's a good reference. I often hear experienced Esperantists claiming they'd hate to work without it on their desks. Esperanto has native and fluent speakers, and dictionaries, and a fairly well-established core vocabulary. And, in practice, 'bona lingvo' is a reform movement, and there are quite a lot of synonyms to deal with. As a speaker, you can fairly freely use either; in English or French, it sounds weird to say 'infant doctor', while it's perfectly normal Esperanto. As a listener, it's helpful to know both 'bona lingvo' style words and European cognates; different people use a different mix. It's like any language community where there's an effort to reduce foreign roots. It goes farther than reform movements in French tend to, but there are plenty of national languages where people sometimes try to remove foreign roots which have been in the language for centuries. As someone who already speaks a European language fluently, 'bona lingvo'/neologism synonyms add basically no work to learning Esperanto for you. It does make the language harder for people who can't at least passively recognize neologisms based on common European words, which is one of the major arguments for the 'bona lingvo' style. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 39 of 40 24 October 2011 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Plenty of people try to explain -j and -n. Both are strictly unnecessary.
However, in a language, you need a way to figure out who's biting who in a sentence like "the dog bites the cat". You can do it through word order, like English. You can do it through somehow marking the object, with a case ending (like in Russian or Esperanto or German) or a particle (like Japanese). But it needs to be done. Conjugating by person does not solve this problem. If you have a group of teachers, and a group of students, and say "The teachers the students help", without a fixed word order, merely changing the form of the verb is useless. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| remush Tetraglot Groupie Belgium remush.beRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6266 days ago 79 posts - 94 votes Speaks: French*, Esperanto, English, Dutch Studies: German, Polish | Message 40 of 40 25 October 2011 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Zamenhof spoke Polish. So, he was well aware of the difficulties caused by such a system. He also learned English and was struck with the simplicity of constructions as: I/you/he/she/we/you/they/one must/can/may (mi/vi/li/ŝi/ni/vi/ili/oni devas/(sci)povas). If English had been allowed to evolve freely, it would have lost the "s" at the third person everywhere. The past tense in English does not make any distinction. In Esperanto, there are no exceptions. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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