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Why Esperanto | ||
Tags: Esperanto | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6894 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes  Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 9 of 33 20 March 2006 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've never been a huge supporter of Esperanto and personally can't see why people just don't put that effort into learning a natural language instead.
While I don't doubt that learning Esperanto might help a little with learning a third language, you can just as readily learn, say, French without having learnt Esperanto first. I certainly didn't need Esperanto to learn French or Mandarin. If you want to learn French, just go ahead and dedicate all your energy to learning it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Felixelus Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6842 days ago 237 posts - 244 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 33 21 March 2006 at 8:19am | IP Logged | ||
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well I think the consensus is that I continue on with my french! Thanks everyone for your advice :)
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 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6913 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 33 21 March 2006 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | ||
Indeed, why should you... Justin B Rye has posted serveral reasons why you should NOT learn Esperanto in his article Espe-Ranto. Enjoy! :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sir Nigel Senior Member United States Joined 7108 days ago 1126 posts - 1102 votes 2 sounds | Message 12 of 33 21 March 2006 at 3:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I guess it's more of a novelty language for those who don't want to speak other "common" languages. Its use seems impractical as if I'm going to need to communicate with a person in another language, why not just use their native tongue as opposed to both people studying a different language?
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| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6872 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 13 of 33 21 March 2006 at 3:55pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree, French would probably be the way to go if that is your ultimate goal. If you had several languages in mind, but weren't sure which to start with, Espernato might be a good one to try some learning with, just to get used to the feel of learning a language, but you certainly don't need to.
To the best of my knowledge, all of the grammatical aspects of it are based on other languages. It seems to me that Esperanto is singled out because it is a man-made language, and so it is flawed, no man-made language could reach the needs of every linguistic background out there. But that is the way it is. It has "oddities" to it, but so does every language. While living in Mexico, some classmates told me that English was crazy, but never stopped to think about why Spanish nouns had gender to them, to the confusion of many Spanish learners. All languages have flaws, obviously that's why there is sexist language, miscommunications, etc. Esperanto is no exception, and I don't think it claims to be. It's an example to see what people could come up with on their own, if they were in charge of Bable. It never claimed to wish replace any language. Esperanto itself is, in my opinion, a masterpiece of art in its own way, and therefore will always be controversial (and that can be a good thing). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7209 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 14 of 33 21 March 2006 at 4:38pm | IP Logged | ||
If an English speaker wants to communicate with someone from China, both speakers have a sizeable learning task to communicate on a meaningful level. Now, if they both want to also talk to people from Russia, Iceland, Finland, and Japan, they could share a common easy to learn language. That's the idea behind Esperanto. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fanatic Octoglot Senior Member Australia speedmathematics.com Joined 7150 days ago 1152 posts - 1818 votes Speaks: English*, German, French, Afrikaans, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch Studies: Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Modern Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 15 of 33 21 March 2006 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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David Richardson wrote in his book, Esperanto - Learning and using the International Language,
"The Esperanto system is completely regular: one prefix and only one "mal"forms the opposite meaning of any word in the language. Such features make Esperanto not just one of the most expressive languages in the world, but also by far the easiest to learn. This writer had a college friend who taught himself a working knowledge of Esperanto in a week, over the spring break. Another American, the Swiss-born author Joseph Scherer, is said to have learned the language in three days. While these were gifted individuals with previous foreign language experience, these examples show what can be done when students invest their time learning the substance of a language, rather than memorizing its inconsistencies. Students at the high-school or college level generally learn Esperanto in a remarkably shorter time than they would spend on a foreign national language. The noted educator and psychologist Edward Thorndike of Columbia University concluded, after a careful study, that one year of college Esperanto is equivalent to four years of a national language." Recent experiments in some English schools have shown that the average student there can learn as much Esperanto in six months as he can learn French in four years." He says, "Even in elementary grades, pupils soon find themselves putting the language to practical use. Doris Vallon, reporting on fourth, fifth, and sixth grade classes in some California schools, noted that some of the brighter children were writing haiku and cinquain poems in Esperanto after only five weeks, and performing puppet shows and skits. Ms. Vallon's fourth-grade class "...learned enough Esperanto in one and a half school years to correspond with classes in ten countries. They wrote one another about family, school, hobbies, music. They learned to read folk tales in Esperanto from many countries.... They developed poise [talking with] Esperanto-speaking visitors from many lands." Another interesting point he makes, "Another, often unexpected benefit of learning Esperanto is that it provides a stimulating introduction to the whole subject of language. Many students go on to study other languages and do very well with them." In an interesting experiment at Somero, Finland, pupils were taught one year of Esperanto followed by two of German. A control group spent the same three years studying German alone. At the end of the first year, the test group knew enough Esperanto to be taught their geography lessons in that language. After the third year, the Esperanto learners had all but overtaken the control class in the amount of German material covered, and they spoke and wrote German with more confidence and enthusiasm than those who had studied only German." A similar experiment in a school near Manchester, England, showed that students who had three years of French following one of Esperanto learned more French than a control class which spent all four years on the latter language. Moreover, students who begin their language study with Esperanto are thus able to postpone decisions about which national languages to study, with no loss of time in the long run. End of quote. I was giving a lecture on language learning at a local library and found his book on Esperanto and promptly borrowed it. I found the concepts intriguing as I had zero interest in learning an "artificial" language. Because I enjoy "playing" with languages, I couldn't resist getting started and finding out more. There is a wealth of information and language learning material on Esperanto on the Internet. I see learning Esperanto as merely a hobby, but so is much of my language learning. It will probably be more useful than the learning of some of the languages I have tackled. I also suspect that the results for Esperanto learners compared with French and German students might have been different if they had been language enthusiasts like people on this forum. One last point. When I worked in Germany I had a very impressive boss who inspired awe in all who worked under him. He was a manager of the old school. One day he was trying to convey a difficult concept of what he wanted me to do and decided to try English to get his point across. It was a mistake because, although he spoke very impressive and formal German, his English was not good, and I immediately looked on him as a "foreigner." This is the point that the writer makes in his book. When everyone speaks a learned language, no one has the advantage of speaking his own language and treating the other speakers like foreigners. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jdanfo Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6889 days ago 11 posts - 13 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Studies: Latin | Message 16 of 33 04 April 2006 at 1:02pm | IP Logged | ||
There are lots of ideas behind Esperanto, and they're largely silly ideas. I did the online Espo course (my tutor was one of the leading modern promoters) and got about halfway through the curso software program before becoming just too bored to continue. It was interesting at first, but as my proficiency grew it became exponentially less so, and it was ultimately not very meaningful. Esperanto advocates make all sorts of unsubstantiated claims, and the few proficient speakers I found seemed a bit mentally unbalanced (speaking to them is like speaking to members of a religious cult). Anyway, one of the great stories everyone spreads is a claim that studies have "proven" that learning Espo makes learning subsequent languages easier. Funny, but whenever I asked for any reliable source (a peer reviewed journal article woulda been nice) with which to verify this nonsense, the promoter would either shut up in a hurry or denounce me as some sort of "enemy of the movement". Another claim is that over a million people speak Espo, and that thousands speak it as a *first language* (i.e. their parents spoke it to them in the first years of their lives). This appears to be so much unsubstantiated bullsh*t, as far as I can tell. There's one decent magazine published in Espo that comes out of China. A few unprofessional, poorly written 'zines, and nothing in the way of serious literature. A better estimate might be that a few thousand speak Espo, most of these speaking it rarely and poorly. If you want to speak the common language of the world, learn English. If you want a more obscure common language, that millions of educated people speak fluently, try Latin or French. Esperanto is a novel idea, but it also is and was an interesting idea that will never realize anything more than obscurity and irrelevance. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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