My English teacher really hates Esperanto (Esperanto) Language Learning Forum

My English teacher really hates Esperanto
Tags: Esperanto \| English
Language Learning Forum : Esperanto

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remush
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Speaks: French*, Esperanto, English, Dutch
Studies: German, Polish

Message 17 of 194

02 November 2007 at 7:18pm | IP Logged

You may add play golf, tennis, chess, go skying... and learn Polish just to get shamelessly drunk. (Przepraszam. Wcale nie myślę tego).
Enthusiasm is the sickness of idle ones. Never believe enthusiastic people, or you'll get in trouble.
Tout dépend du niveau qu'on veut atteindre.
La fille est une turlutte! (z akcentem niemieckim)

frenkeld wrote:

remush wrote:

A good question would be: why most (not all) of those who practise Esperanto are so enthusiastic about it?

A good answer: Most Esperanto practitioners are hobbyists, and hobbyists are generally enthusiastic about their hobbies.

P.S. The profile of the most enthusiastic person on the planet: (a) owns a Mac computer, (b) says that martial arts have changed his life, (c) rides Harley-Davidson or Gold Wing, (d) speaks fluent Esperanto.

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remush
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Speaks: French*, Esperanto, English, Dutch
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Message 18 of 194

02 November 2007 at 9:06pm | IP Logged

Bien. Pouvez-vous m'indiquer où j'ai écrit quelque chose qui vous paraissait émotionnel?
Je me demande où vous avez bien pu pêcher autant d'informations douteuses.
Ceci n'est pas une critique, mais une demande sincère pour mon édification.

Pour les autres remarques que vous faites voyez http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgh4mq6j_11ddrv6g et tout spécialement http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgh4mq6j_11ddrv6g#009
Au sujet des coûts globaux, qui seraient largement moindres pour de meilleurs résultats, lisez http://lingvo.org/grin/ (l'étude originale en français à http://cisad.adc.education.fr/hcee/documents/rapport_Grin.pd f)
Au sujet de l'ordre des mots, référer-vous à http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgh4mq6j_11ddrv6g#051
Quant à trouver un interlocuteur, j'en ai à peu près 500 dans ma liste de contacts, mais je voyage surtout par internet.
Vous insinuez qu'un espérantiste aurait tendance à ne pas apprendre la langue du pays où il se rend. Diable, c'est le contraire. Pourquoi donc les espérantistes seraient plus plurilingues que la moyenne de la population? Par hobby des langues ou parce qu'ils ont des contacts plus facile dans les autres pays? J'étudie actuellement le Polonais en prévision d'un voyage en Pologne en 2009. Pourtant je me rendrai à un congrès où l'Espéranto suffit.
D'après ce que je connaît du mandarin, il y a plusieurs similitudes, notamment les conjugaison sont pratiquement les mêmes qu'en Espéranto, sauf qu'ils mettent "plus tard" ou " auparavant" devant le verbe alors que nous mettons "-os" ou "-is" derrière. Il forment l'adjectif en ajoutant un suffixe -de alors que nous utilisons -a dans ces cas. Ils ont par contre un certain nombre de complications grammaticales que nous n'avons pas. Il faut connaître à peu près 5000 caractères alors qu'en Espéranto il faut connaître un millier de mots pour la même productivité.

Dernière petite anecdote: une de mes connaissance se rend à Tokio et est accueillie par l'ambassadeur. Dans la conversation celui-ci reconnaît que les Japonais sont très fermés: voilà plus de dix ans qu'il est en poste au Japon et qu'il n'a pas encore mis les pieds dans une maison japonaise. Le soir même, notre espérantiste dîne chez des japonais, joue avec leur enfants et ainsi de suite chaque soir chez des hôtes différents durant une semaine. On ne cherche pas un espérantiste à l'étranger; on sait où et quand il est disponible. Cela marcherait-il avec l'Anglais? Sans doute. Quant à affirmer que cela ne peut pas marcher avec l'Espéranto, il y a de la marge.

Chung wrote:

This enthusiasm (or "setting things right") about Esperanto is what makes me wonder. It's a bit like Croats and Serbs who often "educate" outsiders about Serbo-Croatian vs. Croatian and Serbian. In the end, does it really matter? Foreigners who want to learn the language will come to their own conclusions, while those who don't care in the first place, may or may not change their attitude. Would that apathy necessarily affect the survival of the language? There seems to be a close association between Esperanto speakers and the inanimate set of rules and code called "Esperanto". I don't have the same association with English. If you insult English, I just shrug. English is just a combination of sounds, letters and rules. If I had been born somewhere else, I may have been a native speaker of some other language.

I still find it more rewarding for me to learn the native language of my foreign friends when travelling, no matter how imperfect or difficult that foreign language may be. It acknowledges the fact that Esperanto speakers are spread out throughout the world but their numbers are at approximately 1.5 million. The odds of my finding a speaker of Esperanto (thus justifying my need to learn the language) all else equal are much lower than finding someone who for example speaks French.

I never even implied that we should abandon English because it's Indo-European. However, there is a large obstacle in Esperanto becoming a global intermediary language as Zamenhof intended. The sheer number of native and ubiquitousness of native speakers of English in the world today make it more economical and efficient for non-native speakers to learn English for working or educational purposes - cultural and aesthetic objections notwithstanding.

Another point is that if every government in the world were to mandate that Esperanto would be the second official language of their respective countries, it would be time-consuming and costly to establish. While it would benefit the prestige of 1 or 2 million speakers of Esperanto (hint, hint job opportunities for them to teach), it would mean that up to 5.5 billion other people would have to go back to school and learn Esperanto, thus "devaluing" their time spent learning other foreign languages which had been up until then had value (e.g. English, Mandarin, German, French, Arabic, etc.).

Perhaps in the future our descendants will speak Esperanto as native tongue, but that's just conjecture. Until then, Esperanto has a long way to go towards realizing its creator's goal.

While the mechanics of Esperanto are intricate enough, my point was that as a fluent speaker of English and French with semi-active (or semi-passive depending on your point of view) knowledge of other languages, I have an advantage in learning Esperanto than someone who has no background in such languages. Mentioning that it's agglutinative like doesn't necessarily act as an incentive to students whose native languages are agglutinative. The vocabulary is primarily derived from Romance or Germanic languages while it uses a modified Latin alphabet with tenses and moods. The general rule is that a target language becomes "difficult" for a student when it has features that are absent from the student's native language or second/third/etc. language. A prospective Chinese student of Esperanto would still have need to learn how to think about conjugations and rather free word order - things that aren't present in Chinese. In another example, a Hungarian student wouldn't be thrown off by the agglutination in the language, but has no such advantage with vocabulary as Esperanto's vocabulary is hardly transparent with that of Uralic languages

For a laugh, I read a sample of Esperanto as a high school student and was surprised then at how easily I could get the gist of the text based on my knowledge then of English, French, German and Latin. For a purported international auxiliary language, it's certainly easier to acquire and grasp if I speak languages that belong to a certain family of the world's languages.

Oui, j'ai lu plusiers articles plus pires que ceci de Rick et comme vous, je ne les prends pas trop au serieux. L'article de Rick est assez equilibre et il ne devient pas emotionnel comme autres critiques. Je ne suis par contre la langue et si les personnes veulent l'etudier, pourquoi pas? C'est seulment la forte emotion pour la langue qui me semble un peu extreme et me rend prudent.

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furyou_gaijin
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Message 19 of 194

02 November 2007 at 10:05pm | IP Logged

I am still amazed how every mention of Esperanto attracts a large number of very lengthy posts. Also, Esperanto
seems to be the only subject some members have ever written about... Just a thought. (^_^)
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remush
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Message 20 of 194

03 November 2007 at 3:31am | IP Logged

furyou_gaijin wrote:

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Volte
Tetraglot
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Switzerland
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Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
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Message 21 of 194

03 November 2007 at 7:47am | IP Logged

furyou_gaijin wrote:

I am still amazed how every mention of Esperanto attracts a large number of very lengthy posts.

Hey - the world is better if some things are still cause for amazement, yes? (half tongue-in-cheek).

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Karakorum
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Message 22 of 194

04 November 2007 at 2:06am | IP Logged

Has public perception of Esperanto changed over time? Do you think there's a connection between the net socio-political mood of the time and perception of Esperanto? For example is there a difference between the perception of Esperanto in the mid-60's and in the mid 80's?

I Personally have little interest in Esperanto. I think it's just too vanilla. But I don't think Esperantists should all be beaten with baseball bats. Maybe nerf bats, but not baseball bats.
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Volte
Tetraglot
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Switzerland
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Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
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Message 23 of 194

04 November 2007 at 2:49am | IP Logged

Karakorum wrote:

Attitude has varied by time and region. Esperanto has been taught in schools in some areas. On the other side, in Nazi Germany and the USSR, it was considered suspicious, and some Esperantists were put to death.

Karakorum wrote:

I Personally have little interest in Esperanto. I think it's just too vanilla. But I don't think Esperantists should all be beaten with baseball bats. Maybe nerf bats, but not baseball bats.

That would be a possible middle ground, I suppose.

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leosmith
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Message 24 of 194

04 November 2007 at 7:48am | IP Logged

remush wrote:

furyou_gaijin wrote:

Expand

(sorry to steal your thunder furyou)
remush,
Every one of your posts has been in defense of Esperanto. Get it now?

I'd like to know, is there a charter for esperantists to join forums just to defend the mother tongue? I'm very curious, because I've see it happen 3 times in 3 different forums, and I learned from TV detectives not to believe in coincidences. Fess up - show us your secret handshake too, if you don't mind. I love secret handshakes.

Regardless of the very odd behavior of some esperantists, I'm going to learn the language. Sounds like an easy language to learn, and a fun community.

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