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Esperanto a waste of time? | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| mdelling Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5218 days ago 3 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin | Message 217 of 351 19 January 2010 at 6:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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This argument about whether or not studying Esperanto is worthwhile doesn't make sense to me. People should
study whatever language interests them and for whatever reason they like. If their reason, whatever it is, motivates them to keep working at the language then what else is there? I speak Spanish and English and am learning Latin. My Latin has no utility whatsoever but I like it. I enjoy it, so that's why I do it. I plan on studying Italian next which most people would say makes sense but I will probably never use it for any "real" purpose except maybe a future trip to Italy for a week or two. Certainly, it would be handy to speak Italian while on vacation there but will a two week trip really justify the 2 to 3 hundred or so hours I will need to put in to reach my goals with it? Not really, but that's ok because being able to speak Spanish and Italian and read Latin will be cool and very satisfying and that's good enough! Edited by mdelling on 19 January 2010 at 7:01am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5312 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes  Speaks: Swedish* | Message 218 of 351 19 January 2010 at 8:53am | IP Logged | ||||||||
That sounds a bit contradictory. Or perhaps enjoyment is irrelevant to you? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| mdelling Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5218 days ago 3 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin | Message 219 of 351 20 January 2010 at 2:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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By utility I mean no practical value. Of course enjoyment matters to me, that's my point. In the end that's all the
really matters so if people enjoy studying Esperanto they should go for it and not worry about whether it's "worthwhile" in some broader sense or not/ 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ChiaBrain Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5599 days ago 402 posts - 512 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish* Studies: Portuguese, Italian, French Studies: German | Message 220 of 351 20 January 2010 at 5:25am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Actually from what I read in Doviende's post the study showed that even if you substituted that first year with French itself you would not get as far as if you took Esperanto that year. So in terms of aquiring proficiency in French... (1 esperanto + 3 french) > (4 french) and i have to assume... (4 french) > (1 Spanish/Italian/Romanian + 3 French) so... (1 esperanto + 3 french) > (1 [Spanish or Italian or Romanian] + 3 French) I guess owing to the fact that Esperanto's clean grammar makes it easier for students to develop a sense of of grammatical functions without the burden of memorizing all sorts of exceptions. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Reisender Triglot Newbie Italy Joined 5242 days ago 30 posts - 44 votes Speaks: German*, English, Italian Studies: Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek, French | Message 221 of 351 20 January 2010 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I believe the argument was that Esperanto was easier to learn than any of the other languages you proposed. Therefore, while it was allegedly possible to achieve basic competence in Esperanto with just one year of studying it, this was not the case with other languages. (Wow, i'm not sure whether the above post makes sense. May a native speaker check it for grammar? Thanks a lot!) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6947 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 222 of 351 20 January 2010 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Reading your post, doviende's and Cainntear's, I'm not sure about the implied leap of faith in the last relationship. By assuming the validity of that study mentioned by doviende, then... your progress in French is accelerated by studying Esperanto. This is an expected result in isolation as many of us here can already attest from personal experience that learning or having learned ANY new language ("language x") will accelerate the learning process for a subsequent language ("language x+1"). The process for learning "language x+1" can be accelerated even more if "language x+1" is similar to "language x". By assuming the validity of the general observation above, then... 1 year of studying Aromanian / Catalan / Esperanto / Italian / Occitan / Portuguese / Romanian / Romansch / Spanish / [any non-Romance language] as the second language will reduce the time needed to learn French as the third language versus studying French as the second language for 4 years. (The study mentioned by Dovidende implies that having learned Esperanto for 1 year reduced the time needed to learn French as the third language to some level by 25% based on an observed drop of study time from 4 years to 3 years (Incidentally, I can't find in Doviende's post any mention to which level of competency in French these students achieved in the 3 or 4 years)). In any case, why should Esperanto be granted a special position over French's cognate languages in the last relationship? If anything, knowing languages such as Catalan or Occitan (to say nothing of Walloon or Franco-Provençal/Arpitan) should grant an even greater advantage to someone who moves on to learning French since these particular languages have been demonstrated by comparative linguists to be among the most closely-related languages to French. EDIT: Upon closer inspection of ChiaBrain's post, I find the second assumption even more jarring. ChiaBrain's second assumption is:
This flies in the face of what many of us have already experienced and what Cainntear has reiterated. This particular assumption means that learning Spanish, Italian or Romanian yields little or no benefit in accelerating the learning process for French. ChiaBrain's second and third assumptions ignore cognates, grammatical similarities and the empirical relationship where rate of acquisition when learning a given language is positively related to the quantity of languages learned/known previously (not just because of similarities between certain languages but also through refinement or development of language-learning strategies in the learning process itself. i.e. you learn how to study/learn), all else equal. I am NOT to be interpreted that learning Esperanto is useless (as some Esperantists or their boosters may be tempted to do), because for the record it is NOT useless. However my experiences and reading of comparative linguistics reveal to me inconsistencies or contradictions used to elevate Esperanto over other languages as a communicative tool or some kind of "magic bullet" in learning languages. Edited by Chung on 20 January 2010 at 5:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| davidwelsh Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5320 days ago 141 posts - 307 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, Norwegian, Esperanto, Swedish, Danish, French Studies: Polish, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, Mandarin | Message 223 of 351 20 January 2010 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Because you can learn 5 or 10 times more Esperanto in a year than you can Catalan or Occitan. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5802 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 224 of 351 20 January 2010 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Or any other structured IAL conlang. At the same time, there are features of Esperanto that are irrelevant to learners of French. But the question of shared features begs the question: "What is a different language?" This is essentially the same question as "What is the difference between a language and a dialect?" Esperanto is Indo-European in character and as such helps you learn French far more than Japanese would, but is it as useful to students of Malayalam, or would they gain more from studying some Telugu than from learning Esperanto? It's important to ask this, because it leads me to wonder if a specifically designed simplified student Romance language wouldn't be even better for students intending to learn French than Esperanto. What about going one step further and using a language specifically designed for French learners? Reduce this further and you end up with the idea of teaching the regular components of the language first and tacking on the irregular stuff later -- analogously to teaching Basic English in order to start a student learning English. In fact, it leads me to think that the problem Esperanto addresses is the lack of logic and structure in many language learning syllabuses, that perhaps the random selection of phrases with little common grammar ("Hello, my name is John, how are you?") is too much for the absolute beginner. If the learn is taught is a steadily progressive way, wouldn't that obviate the need for a logical "gateway" language? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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