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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 25 of 29 26 March 2007 at 11:14am | IP Logged | ||
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I've been playing around with the Kurso de Esperanto, and let me say that Esperanto is, indeed, an easy language to learn.
I would almost say that being so easy is going to make it a little hard for me to learn. Why? Because I'm proficient in French, and have studied some German and Spanish, it's like all the Esperanto words I see remind me of something. I can almost intuit the meaning once I pronounce it out. That means I rip through the lessons and they leave almost no impression on my brain. Also, I tend to remember best by "hearing" the language in my head. Esperanto sounds like French, German and Spanish have been put into a blender, then pronounced in a Brazillian/Italian way. It's like there's no one sound for me to latch onto. I'm afraid that I would work through an entire course, be able to understand anything put in front of me, and not be able to speak a word of the language. What a strange feeling. 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 26 of 29 26 March 2007 at 2:42pm | IP Logged | ||
I know that feeling. The only words you won't be able to understand immediately are the ones with affixes, unless you have learned those. Things like "malvarmeta"(mal-varm-et-a), "enirejo"(en-ir-ej-o) or "malliberejo"(mal-liber-ej-o). In order to activate Esperanto in your brain, you have to do writing or speaking exercises like the ones in the 10-lesson course I did (2nd in my list). Or give yourself writing tasks in Esperanto: present yourself, write a letter, a diary entry, forum post, whatever, even if you find you have to look up a lot of words and grammar again. Maybe find an Esperanto penfriend. Imho the second step towards active language usage would be to go into an Esperanto chat room such as the one at www.babilejo.org and participate there. Text chat still gives you time to look up words and think about how to phrase your sentence, as long as you don't need to look up more than let's say 3 words per sentence. The third step would be using the language in voice. There you pretty much have to respond immediately, so it's less indulgent than text chat. Either find an Esperanto speaker / club / event in your area or join a voice-chat network such as Paltalk or Skype (you'll need a microphone though). Since everybody speaks Esperanto as a foreign language, Esperanto speakers will be trying to help you along as a beginner and not laugh at your mistakes. There are a few, mostly old people, who like correcting others a lot though, to show off their expertise. If you have an uncomfortable feeling taking these steps, especially the final one, send me a private message and we can probably arrange a private meeting on one of those messenging systems, so you can test your Esperanto on me. Maybe you could also try some Taiwanese Mandarin on me, since I have only been studying some Beijing Mandarin so far and I might be going to a conference in Taiwan this fall. I'd like to know how likely I am to understand people there. Edited by Sprachprofi on 26 March 2007 at 2:47pm 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 27 of 29 26 March 2007 at 7:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, give me a couple of weeks to go through the grammar and lessons. I'm using the Kurso as and introduction, then moving on to the course you recommended. Seemed a logical progression. I downloaded the Esperanto for Non-Grammarians book, which I am going to print out. If you cut off the dictionary at the end, it's only about 85 pages, which would be easy to digest in a week or two.
After that, then I'll worry about taking other steps. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6241 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 28 of 29 02 April 2007 at 11:16am | IP Logged | ||
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We have strayed from the subject with too much Esperanto talk. He needs tv, comics, toons, cool stuff. A 13 yr. old boy? Likes Japanese? He's into anime, isn't he? :) Let him try it. I don't think he'll get discouraged from other languages as Japanese has the perfect excuse of being one of the hardest languages in the world.
Another option? Italian. Spanish. Cannot get easier than those two for an English speaker. Italian has loads of comics and even dubbed anime that's hard to find outside of Japan. There are also mountains of comics like Dylan Dog, Alan Ford, translated manga etc. Italian is also a great springboard into Spanish. Spanish was already explained. Portuguese is somewhat harder to pronounce but has a coolness factor to it. I would also suggest he doesn't neglect Polish altogether. It would be a shame. An underdog choice? Serbo-Croatian. A Slavic language. Loads of comics and other stuff but you have to dig for it. Great beaches. Popular with some Poles. 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 29 of 29 03 April 2007 at 4:32am | IP Logged | ||
No worries, it's interesting. I see you've seconded a lot of the previous suggestions, but the only problem with Japanese is to find him a decent tutor wich I KNOW he'll need. It's hard enough for people with language background to try to learn another language alone, but he has almost no formal learning. Still, I think he can manage it. And if not, tehre's always Spanish. Thank you for the recommendations :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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