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Esperanto’s benefit for language learners | ||
Tags: Esperanto | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5821 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 65 of 78 17 April 2010 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | ||
The implication there is that tonality is separate from phonemics -- it is not, it is a phonemic feature. Say we wanted to use the English word "body" in a new language, but we stripped out the voicing of consonants in our new language. The mnemonic value of the target word would be lost as it would sound like "potty", which is an entirely different word. Consider the classic example: "Did mother scold the horse?" - "mā mà mă ma?" Is the "ma" in our new conlang mother, to scold, horse or a question marker? The further away it gets, the less value it is. If the sound changes are relatively consistent, as they are (for the most part) between Italian and Spanish, then this is still useful, but if you are taking your root words from all over the world, you will not have a consistent, productive, sound-change rule. This is why some conlangers abandon all attempts at cognates when building a candidate international language. If you do want to stick with cognates, I would suggest that you started with common European word roots as your core vocabulary, and then use the Chinese model of combining these basic roots to form bigger words. Phonemic cognates for Europe, cognates in compound structure for Chinese. But that just leaves the rest of the world out in the cold. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| theallstar Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5612 days ago 81 posts - 85 votes Studies: Japanese, Esperanto | Message 66 of 78 20 April 2010 at 2:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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On the subject of Esperanto's benefit for language learners, which Romance language do people think that it is closest to? Would it set me up better for learning Spanish than French for example (I'm thinking in terms of the vocabulary and grammar used within Esperanto)?
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| urubu Pentaglot Groupie Germany Joined 6416 days ago 49 posts - 72 votes Speaks: German*, Dutch, Portuguese, Indonesian, English | Message 67 of 78 20 April 2010 at 7:52pm | IP Logged | ||
French, being the Romance language Zamenhof knew best. Also, quite a few anatomical, zoological and botanical terms are essentially Latin, with the Esperanto noun ending -o (kverko, fago, betulo, taksuso ...). Edited by urubu on 20 April 2010 at 7:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5821 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 68 of 78 20 April 2010 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | ||
No. Esperanto has a lot of features that are irrelevant to the learner of Spanish. But then Spanish is more useful to a learner of French than French is to a learner of Spanish. But the most useful thing to a learner of Spanish is Spanish. IMO the use of any language as a "gateway" language only makes sense if you don't have a particular target language in mind. If you want or need to learn a particular language, learn it. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6280 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 69 of 78 20 April 2010 at 11:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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What you said would be common sense, Cainntear, except for Esperanto and beginning
language learners it has been proven wrong (details of the studies). Learning Esperanto for 1 year followed by 3 years of French, students will master French better than if they learned French for 4 years. Also, another condition under which gateway languages (of any kind) make sense is if you are interested in the gateway language itself. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6282 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 70 of 78 21 April 2010 at 10:19am | IP Logged | ||
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Sprachprofi -- however, I imagine those studies were probably done on the general population (correct me if I'm wrong). I used to be among the general population -- somebody who took language classes more because he had to than because he wanted to. But somewhere along the way -- oddly enough, this happened during a period when I wasn't actually studying languages -- something "clicked" in my brain and I was able to comprehend foreign grammar structures much more easily. (No doubt that a big part of this was that I'd begun to get a genuine interest in language instead of treating it as a boring subject I'm forced to learn in school!) When I was in Spanish III in high school, I struggled just to understand the lesson material. Ever since I picked it back up on my own, though, I've had no problems with the language at all... the only thing I need to do is practice it more. In fact, I haven't had any problems with any language apart from Japanese, and my main problem with that is vocabulary is hard to remember... its grammar presents no significant problem to me.
I suspect the role of Esperanto in language teaching is to get you to that point sooner, that magic point where you get used to learning grammar and being able to easily identify objects, adverbial phrases, etc. and how they relate to what you're learning. So Esperanto may be useful for such a student, but I doubt there would be similar results for somebody like me who's already gotten there. - Kef Edited by furrykef on 21 April 2010 at 10:24am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6280 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 71 of 78 21 April 2010 at 11:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Kef, you may be right on this, though I do find that Esperanto gives me an understanding
of Chinese, Greek and Arabic that I didn't get just from English or Latin, because Esperanto is able to build equivalent structures or equivalent words while the typical European language is not versatile enough to do so. Anyway, I did not want to conjecture about this issue until there is actual research into it, that's why I said "for Esperanto and beginning language learners". The original poster would definitely qualify for Esperanto's learning boost because Esperanto and Japanese are his first foreign languages. Edited by Sprachprofi on 21 April 2010 at 11:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mrhenrik Triglot Moderator Norway Joined 5889 days ago 482 posts - 658 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, French Personal Language Map | Message 72 of 78 21 April 2010 at 11:25am | IP Logged | ||
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I could swear I had read something disputing the results from the research quoted in the
Wikipedia article, but I cannot find it anywhere. In any case, the sample and the research scope seems far to small to get a reliable result, disputed or not. Personally I'd assume Esperanto's main benefit for language learning is motivation, especially for monolingual learners. It would show them that it is indeed possible to speak two languages and probably open up for highly motivated language study later on. I guess this could be somewhat along the lines of what furrykef mentions about the point where languages "click" as well - that could be a motivational boost indeed. I would hope some proper in-depth research is done on this as it's a very interesting subject, but I guess it would be a fairly expensive endeavour. Oh well! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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