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Help Picking a language for a Younger Sib | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6496 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 17 of 29 24 March 2007 at 9:23pm | IP Logged | ||
OK, I admit that this recent discussion has made me more interested in Esperanto than I have been in a long time. If one wanted to accept your challenge, then what would the best resources to use to carry through with it? Is it in one of the links Sprachproffi listed above? Or do we actually have to spend money? ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MeshGearFox Senior Member United States Joined 6489 days ago 316 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 18 of 29 24 March 2007 at 10:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you're doing this with Esperanto, can I try and be some sort of control and, say, spend six weeks on Swedish? If so, maybe we could convince some other people to get in on this. Maybe a few more doing esperanto, and a few more studying other easy languages. See how it works out. Pick a single start time or something?
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| Andy_Liu Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong leibby.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6580 days ago 255 posts - 257 votes Speaks: Mandarin, Cantonese*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 19 of 29 25 March 2007 at 3:23am | IP Logged | ||
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So, the sibling of the thread starter is a native speaker of ?English? and ?Polish?, all being Indo-European and Latin-based.
What about picking one for a Hong Kong teenager? (Including me too, I'm marginally teenage) Esperanto may share links with English, but it's very remote from a Chinese speaker indeed. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6264 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 20 of 29 25 March 2007 at 5:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Giving a language a try for 6 weeks? Nice idea. I organized something similar at Unilang several times, called a "Language Learning Month". Unfortunately the last few times many people just participated in order to push their favourite language in the voting for the two languages of the month, not because they actually intended to try out a new language.
Anyway, for those who'd like to give Esperanto a try, I can particularly recommend the following free courses: * The best one around right now is probably "Ana Pana" at Lernu, an 8-lesson course with sounds, interactive exercises, free tutors etc. Teaches somewhat few words per lesson for my taste, but you can go through the lessons very quickly and pick up more words from original material afterwards. * The course I used to learn Esperanto can be found here. It has 10 lessons, which are quite extensive. A free tutoring service is also included. After completing this course, you should have a very good level of Esperanto, since it teaches not just all grammar but also a lot of vocabulary and each lesson has two lesson texts. On the down side, there is rather much grammar taught very quickly: the first lesson presents almost all basic grammar for passive knowledge already, later lessons elaborate and actually teach it and past lesson 5 the grammar sections are mostly just revision. Another down side is that this course was developed for teaching through mail or e-mail, so there's no multimedia. If a lot of people are interested, I could probably make recordings though. * If you like Assimil-style sentences with translations and few explanations, Lernu's "Vojaĝu kun Zam" is for you. * If you are a fan of the "direct method" where you don't use your native language at all, use the "Bildoj kaj demandoj" course at Lernu. * If you aren't fluent in any language besides English yet, or if you don't know grammar terms well, there's a nice textbook for you at here. I like that it teaches grammar slowly and explains it well for people who never heard of terms like "noun" and "adjective". It also teaches a good amount of vocabulary. It doesn't come with sounds or tutors, but if you choose to use this course, you can contact me with questions. * A computer program teaching Esperanto can be found here. It teaches grammar and basic vocabulary and it contains sound files, songs, dictation exercises and the like. Tutors are available, too. What I dislike about this course is that it never goes beyond the sentence level - texts would help seeing words in action better. * If you are looking for a Pimsleur-like audio-only course, "Jen nia mondo" is for you. Unfortunately this one is not available for free, you have to buy the CDs. Once you have some very basic knowledge of Esperanto, you can also just dive into the language by reading Lernu's Library(hover over any word to see its translation or definition, that way reading even 30% unknown texts is doable), Esperanto forums (the Lernu forums also have this nice hover-look-up function) and chats or this comic strip in easy Esperanto. If you want a really quick introduction to Esperanto in just 2 hours or so, have a look at this quick and dirty guide or these lessons. Afaik there aren't many useful languages that are related to Chinese, so while Esperanto would be foreign, it would still be one of the easiest options for a Chinese person. Especially since you can make so many new words based on one word stem, meaning you don't have to learn as many foreign word stems. Don't forget that Esperanto is quite big in Japan and Iran, both of which speak languages completely unrelated to Esperanto. And Russian is only slightly related. Edited by Sprachprofi on 25 March 2007 at 6:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6496 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 21 of 29 25 March 2007 at 6:43am | IP Logged | ||
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We just pretty much hijacked this thread, didn't we? I hope the original poster was satisfied with his answer.
While I was looking at Gutenberg earlier, I found several texts translated into Esperanto, including Alice in Wonderland and the Murders in the Rue Morgue. I also found this, which bills itself as an Esperanto grammar and graded reader. It unfortunately is only available in ascii, which doesn't have the special characters used in Esperanto, but other than that it seems like a great resource. Have you looked at it, Sprachproffi? What do you think of it? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6264 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 22 of 29 25 March 2007 at 7:01am | IP Logged | ||
It's about as valuable as the Esperanto course for non-grammarians, I'd say, very similar approach. I don't see any graded reader, unless you mean the sentences given with each lesson. I dislike that the vocabulary given is not of the most useful sort, introducing words like "dove" and "to sew" before "name". The sentences have an old feel to them, maybe this book is a reprint of an old one. Btw, if you choose the HTML version you do see the Unicode letters. Edited by Sprachprofi on 25 March 2007 at 7:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Silvestris Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6358 days ago 131 posts - 136 votes Speaks: English*, Polish*, German | Message 23 of 29 25 March 2007 at 7:30am | IP Logged | ||
Very satisfied, as a matter of fact. I already have my answers and the thread is still interesting to read. Once again, thank you! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6496 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 24 of 29 25 March 2007 at 7:58am | IP Logged | ||
Considering the book was written in 1910, that shouldn't be much of a surprise. It's Gutenberg. It's all old books. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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