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Esperanto a waste of time? | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5331 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes  Speaks: Swedish* | Message 105 of 351 02 December 2009 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I think the point would be to be able to spot other Esperantists, never to miss an opportunity to practise your skills, or meet new friends. It makes much less sense for natural languages, because very few people will want to make friends with you just because you know a bit of French. Getting back to the topic, let's discuss neutrality again. It seems that Esperantists also agree that the language is far from neutral politically, being internationalist in nature and created with a clear purpose. Now many people today are internationalists, but perhaps not in exactly that sense. The fact that it's geographically neutral, in the sense that it is not the native language of any country, is not an advantage. I don't think that the number of people that object to learning English because of British or American imperialism is significant. On the other hand, millions and millions of people want to learn English precisely because it is spoken in America. They don't care about past or present exploitation and imperialism, they just think that Coke tastes good and American pop-culture is te epitome of cool. Or they want to succeed in business, where English is prevalent. So this very neutrality is the biggest obstacle in my view. There are probably more people studying Swedish right now than Esperanto! As to neutrality in the sense that it's nobody's native language and hence equally difficult for both parties in a discussion, that is quite a negative reason. You can also achieve this by speaking some other language that neither of you is fully comfortable in! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6249 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 106 of 351 02 December 2009 at 3:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
a) There are quite a few people who are fully comfortable in Esperanto. b) It takes way less time and effort to become comfortable in Esperanto than any other language; it takes less time to become fully comfortable in it as well. It's not "equally difficult" for people in many discussions, because they've invested different amounts of effort into learning it. It is the native language of perhaps a couple of thousand of people; I know several native speakers. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5648 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 107 of 351 02 December 2009 at 4:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I haven't actually learnt Esperanto (I know I ought to put my money where my mouth is or however the saying goes..) but I have had my hands full with Russian...
But once I can count myself "worthy" I'll definitely get some kind of discrete Esperanto tag... Maybe a pin for my coat, a backpack or a t-shirt with a green star for the summer. No doubt some enthusiast is selling it. Would be fun to see how long it takes before somebody spots it and is bold enough to ask. Esperanto is clearly more than a language - it's partly also an ideology / lifestyle... which I support 100% 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6249 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 109 of 351 02 December 2009 at 7:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Can I put a precise number on it? No. As for percent of the world population: tiny. I'm not claiming Esperanto is widely spoken; it's not. I'm claiming it can be mastered, just as, say, Welsh can.
"Fully comfortable" means native-like proficiency, to me. I'm fluent in Esperanto, but not 'fully comfortable'; I make some grammatical errors and can't really name many types of flowers...
No, it really isn't.
The definition of 'native' in this case isn't more open to debate than it is in any other bilingual situation. There are a number of people who have been raised this way, and they consider themselves, and are considered, native Esperanto speakers. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5796 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 112 of 351 03 December 2009 at 2:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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What I find to be an interesting property of Esperanto, is that all the rules work in all cases. Everything you learn can be generalized with your intuition. This is in heavy contrast to every other language I've seen.
As you grow up, and learn to speak your native language, you are fed a constant stream of corrections. In English, maybe you say "foots" instead of "feet", "taked" instead of "took", etc. This is because you've observed some patterns in how people talk, but then you keep running into all these weird exceptions as you learn. In Esperanto, however, there are none of these. As soon as you grasp a pattern, you can generalize and it always works. This means that you have the ability to bypass one of the things that takes the longest to learn, and one of the things that will keep "good" speakers of a language from sounding like "native" speakers of the language. You will quickly build up your Esperanto-intuition, and you'll be able to rely on it perfectly. In this sense, anyone can become a native-like speaker of Esperanto. This is another form of the neutrality of the language. You don't get the hierarchical sense that one person (the native) is always a source of obscure knowledge about the exceptions, and the other (the non-native) is always stumbling over those "gotchas" no matter how much time they put in. It's interesting to hear the stories of small children growing up speaking both Espranto and another language. I was reading an article by Claude Piron where he mentions a five-year-old from France who could speak Esperanto with no mistakes, but had all the common mistakes of a five-year-old French speaker that needed to be corrected. Piron describes this in terms of "first degree reflexes" and "second degree reflexes". In the first degree reflexes, you figure out a pattern and start generalizing it. The second degree, however, is where you have to actively suppress all those words that are exceptions to the first rules (foots, taked, etc). Esperanto has none of these, so you can flow freely through the language purely on first degree reflexes. here's a quote:
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