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Beginning Esperanto | ||
Tags: Esperanto | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Shinn Trilingual Tetraglot Groupie India gallery.takingitglob Joined 6201 days ago 61 posts - 69 votes  Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Oriya*, SpanishB2 Studies: FrenchB1, Japanese, Irish | Message 1 of 23 10 May 2007 at 4:04am | IP Logged | ||
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I started learning Esperanto from Monday, the 7th of May and so far it's been going great.
The reason I'm learning Esperanto is because I'm curious as to what a constructed language would be like. If language is the way in which you see the world, how would the world look like through a created tongue? Besides, it is a fairly easy language and not one that would cause any confusion with my on going Spanish studies. And a language, any language, is always an investment so why not? The first day I just read up on the language and it's structure. I'm finding that the almost minimalist structure of the language doesn't really make it unexciting as I believed at first. It has a fairly, pleasant sound, somewhere between Italian and Polish. What I love best about it is the freedom given to the speaker to make the language his own. The logical, grammar coded structure feels just a little bit monotonous but thanks to this quality it makes it easier for the learner to work with the language. After all, if you figure out the rules of the game, it becomes so much easier to win. I signed up for a 10 Lesson Esperanto course. I need a basic framework first so that I can build up as I go. I have been assigned a tutor and I started my first bit of real studying on Tuesday; reading the first lesson and doing the translations that followed. My exercises for the first lesson have been perfect and I hope it continues this way. I have also signed up for the 6 week challenge. This way I have an end to work towards and hopefully won't be in danger of dropping out mid way. My basic plan is: + Finishing the 10 lesson plan. + Building up my vocabulary through other resources (I have been recommended Lernu's Gerda Malaperis course). + Writing as my vocabulary and knowledge increases; as the written aspect of language has always been more of a strong point for me rather than the spoken one. + Reading a few short texts. Here's hoping for an interesting journey into my first constructed language. Edited by Shinn on 10 May 2007 at 4:26am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6259 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 2 of 23 10 May 2007 at 4:59am | IP Logged | ||
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Good luck with your studies!
I prefer a "too easy" and "too regular" grammar to one with lots of complexity and exceptions, but in a forum of language lovers I may be the exception ;-) One thing I really like about Esperanto is that you can play with the affixes and nobody can tell you that the words you created are wrong. Like in English when I saw that the -ness ending transforms "good" into "goodness" and "happy" into "happiness" but I am NOT allowed to transform "free" into "freeness". In Esperanto, since the language is so regular, you can't make mistakes by playing with words like this. As soon as you know some basic words and affixes, you should definitely try this game of creating as many new words as possible, even crazy ones. It broadens your mind and it helps you find ways to express yourself even with a limited vocabulary. For example, using the root "sana"(healthy), you should be able to make at least the following words: health, healthy stuff, to cure, medicine, doctor, ill, illness, patient, hospital (two ways of saying it), ... this assumes of course that you know all the major affixes. Feeling comfortable in creatively using affixes is the key element if you want to become fluent in Esperanto and feel that you can express yourself as well and sometimes even better in Esperanto than in your mother tongue. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Shinn Trilingual Tetraglot Groupie India gallery.takingitglob Joined 6201 days ago 61 posts - 69 votes Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Oriya*, SpanishB2 Studies: FrenchB1, Japanese, Irish | Message 3 of 23 12 May 2007 at 6:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you :)
Yes, the grammar codings really help. I read somewhere that Esperanto could be the best programming language, because a computer would find it easier to learn something so logical; as compared to a language like English. Now that I'm learning it, it doesn't seem too improbable. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6228 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 23 12 May 2007 at 7:30am | IP Logged | ||
As a programmar, I must disagree. Esperanto is more logical and regular than most human languages, but it still has many ambiguities. Something like Lojban (another conlang), designed so that it can be parsed by computers, and with a heavy influence from predicate logic would be closer to this. That said, I don't think the best programming languages are like natural languages. Attempts to make programming languages of this sort have lead to verbose, ugly languages, where expression is slow and tedious, such as SQL and COBOL; both are widely used, but at least the latter is reviled. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Shinn Trilingual Tetraglot Groupie India gallery.takingitglob Joined 6201 days ago 61 posts - 69 votes Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Oriya*, SpanishB2 Studies: FrenchB1, Japanese, Irish | Message 5 of 23 12 May 2007 at 7:36am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the correction Volte. The article I read said so because according to the writer it would be easier to teach a computer an artificial language rather than a natural one. I wonder though if there's any conlang that could be poetic and pleasant while at the same time logical enough to make sense to a machine.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6228 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 23 12 May 2007 at 8:05am | IP Logged | ||
At this point in history, nothing "makes sense" to machines. The way programming languages work is that humans understand what statements in them mean, and then write things (compilers and interpreters) which translate these statements to equivalent mathematical operations. What this requires is either a lack of ambiguity, or a way to resolve it when it occurs. There is nothing that can be classified as understanding in the process. Having computers understand and make sense of things has long been a goal; the field that deals with this is known as Artificial Intelligence (AI). Unfortunately, its results have been extremely limited. There was great enthusiasm in the 1960s-1980s, followed by a reality check, and what was called the "AI winter", where research and funding dropped quite dramatically, and some technologies often associated with AI fell into near-disuse. Nowadays, there has been a bit of a revival, but it's largely via heuristics and search algorithms. People have realized that we can't currently define intelligence, and that we barely have an idea of what it is. Huge amounts have been written on how complicated 'common sense' is; an excerpt of Pinker's book "How the mind works" gives a gentle introduction to this problem. As for the other part of your question, whether a conlang could be logical enough to make sense to a machine, whilst poetic and pleasant: the answer isn't entirely obvious to me. People do write poetry in programming languages; googling for "perl poetry", without quotes, finds quite a lot of examples. However, this poetry is purely for human appreciation; some of it is in the form of actual, working programs, but the machines running it are entirely oblivious to the poetic aspects. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Shinn Trilingual Tetraglot Groupie India gallery.takingitglob Joined 6201 days ago 61 posts - 69 votes Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Oriya*, SpanishB2 Studies: FrenchB1, Japanese, Irish | Message 7 of 23 15 May 2007 at 3:05am | IP Logged | ||
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That reminds of something I read in my Psychology textbook -- Intelligence is that which is measured by intelligence tests.
Perl poetry sounds interesting. Who knows maybe there's poetry hidden in the rhythms of html tags that only a computer enjoys. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Shinn Trilingual Tetraglot Groupie India gallery.takingitglob Joined 6201 days ago 61 posts - 69 votes Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Oriya*, SpanishB2 Studies: FrenchB1, Japanese, Irish | Message 8 of 23 15 May 2007 at 11:19am | IP Logged | ||
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Week One:
In this week I've completed 4 lessons of the 10 week lesson programme. Since I can't keep bombarding my tutor with emails for correcting the excercises, I usually study the next lesson while awaiting the correction. So this way I've sent off 3 lessons for correction while doing two more on my own. Vocabulary acquisition hasn't been too much of a problem since most words are similar to their French and Spanish counterparts. This week I mostly limited myself to the vocabulary given in the lessons but I need a more structured plan centred around a common topic. My weak points in Esperanto also revolve around the fact that many words are similar to Romance languages. Most of the mistakes in my excercises stem from this fact (writing "hora" instead of "horo" for example). Also, I keep confusing the verb conjugations; easy as they are. I keep forgetting that every pronoun has the exact same conjugation; that "la" is applicable for everything and that there is no male and female classification in Esperanto. So basically it is the little things that are posing more of a problem. My studies for this week haven't been as in depth as I wanted and my vocabulary is still quite limited. Now that most of the basics are down and the "shock" of a new language is slowly diminishing; I can add to the email lessons. I plan to start with word lists classified by themes. So basically that's it for Week One. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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