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Esperanto a waste of time? | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| ChiaBrain Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5598 days ago 402 posts - 512 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish* Studies: Portuguese, Italian, French Studies: German | Message 233 of 351 21 January 2010 at 6:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you, Hoogamagoo
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6946 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 234 of 351 21 January 2010 at 8:01am | IP Logged | |||||
On this I can agree to a point, since I have achieved at least basic fluency in French, German and Hungarian (I admit though that I've demoted the last two some time ago to "intermediate" because of disuse. However I'm confident that I can get those two back to fluency with some revision or re-immersion). In general I aligned more closely with the axiom that the more languages under your belt, the easier it usually becomes to learn subsequent languages. However, making a diversion by learning a third language to fluency in mid-stream while studying a second language as a way to boost confidence seems a bit odd to me. Then again, I'm speaking for myself and what I've seen done.
Is this a function of language instruction in the classroom itself on one hand or rather the characteristics of the language or degree of relationship/similiarity between the languages in question? On this board, there seems to be a tilt that we're better off learning independently than in classrooms (or at least study in a classroom needs quite a bit of supporting independent study). I have seen the frustration that you mention above with people suffering through classroom instruction for languages, coming to the conclusion that they're no good with languages. However no one is incapable of learning a language, and we've already seen that a good part of it comes from motivation, background as well a perceived need for that language. Esperanto classes aren't immune to poor teaching or demotivated students any more than classes in natural languages. In addition, the study done in Sheffield concluded that among more intelligent students, the ones who went on to do best (i.e. also got active ability) in French as the original L2 within the 4 years were those who did French only. Those who did a year of Esperanto (effectively this becomes L2) ended up at a slightly lower level of mastery by being better passively rather than actively in French (L3 or the "original" L2). On my examples of using similar languages as "bridge languages" to L3s, why should fluency in L2 be the taken as an indicator of success of this strategy? If the goal is to streamline the learning or mastering of German, then it shouldn't matter whether that year of using Dutch as L2 leads to fluency in Dutch. If you learn Dutch to fluency that's great, but you can't dismiss the benefits in acquiring German with a native background in English, and some background (not necessarily fluency) in Dutch. I've just realized that Estonian and to a smaller degree Hungarian have indavertently acted as "bridges" to my current study of Finnish. I can tell you now that if I had learned Esperanto (even to fluency) it wouldn't have had a bearing on my feelings or confidence in realizing my current plan of working towards basic fluency in Finnish. I know that I can learn anything when I put my mind to it and give an honest effort. As it relates to Finnish, my knowledge of the quite similar Estonian (no matter that I'm not fluent in it) and more distantly-related Hungarian (no matter that I'm no longer fluent in it) has prepared me better than anything else to grasp the contents of my Finnish course. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5832 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 235 of 351 17 June 2010 at 12:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yes. We should be saving endangered languages not promoting fake ones.
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| mrhenrik Triglot Moderator Norway Joined 5869 days ago 482 posts - 658 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, French Personal Language Map | Message 236 of 351 17 June 2010 at 5:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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That was a very short post to bump up a six month old thread with - would you perhaps
care to elaborate on your reasoning behind choosing an endangered language over an artifical one? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5832 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 237 of 351 18 June 2010 at 6:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd try to save some of the grammatical features found in very rare languages/lesser used languages to preserve humankind's linguistic heritage.
Also I would have used a lot more Greek words in Esperanto. Many languages have a lot of Greek words in them so they would be easy to learn. For example the word atmosphere is made up of the Greek words atmos (vapour) sphere (ball). This would allow people to understand scientific words better. Hippopotamus is another example. Greek hippo=horse, potamus=river. Esperanto doesn't offer you this kind of insight. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| QuizD Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5061 days ago 8 posts - 13 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 238 of 351 20 June 2010 at 11:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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Esperanto is a good secret language.
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| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5832 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 239 of 351 20 June 2010 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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really? I can understand a lot of Esperanto even though I have never studied it!!!
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| Hoogamagoo Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6341 days ago 14 posts - 70 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto | Message 240 of 351 22 June 2010 at 6:44am | IP Logged | |||||
This intrigues me. It kind of sounds like you want to construct a language that is composed mostly of rare grammatical features. Either that or you want to artificially incorporate those features into currently popular tongues. Yet, neither of these implied solutions seem consistent with your previously expressed disdain for "promoting fake languages." It might interest you to know that Esperanto was actually designed, in part, to preserve languages. Esperanto's theory was to act as a bridge. The idea is that if everybody sticks with their native tongue as their first language and takes Esperanto as a supplemental language, then the native tongues would be preserved, because you'd only use Esperanto in places where you weren't comfortable with the local tongue. The main historical example that is cited to demonstrate how this could work is the Native American sign language that many of the scouting groups learn. This was a real language devised as a bridge language. It worked successfully and several languages coexisted in the same area for some time (although we have no idea for how long). The unique tribal languages were preserved in this way. That's how Esperanto is theoretically supposed to preserve endangered languages. Of course, the obvious argument is: if everybody spoke Esperanto, then over time there should eventually be sufficient cross-linguistic interbreeding (between these bridged Esperanto speakers) so that Esperanto would become a more common first language (assuming the parents just let the child learn Esperanto first, since it is their common language) and invalidates any preservative value that it had. End result: One language dominates and kills all the other languages, anyway. In fact, it's worse because Esperanto has such persistent rules that it is less prone to dialectical variations than natural languages. Esperanto can always go back its roots, English can become completely incomprehensible over time and distance and has the potential to develop into completely new languages. I present the obvious rebuttal (which I'm sure has already come up somewhere in this thread somewhere), so that we don't have to deviate from your solution to the endangered language problem, which is what really intrigues me. Also, I can probably safely say that there are no Esperantists who can realistically imagine the day when Esperanto is spoken so widely as to threaten any of the dominant languages of the world... only a few very worked up anti-Esperantists can see that happening. I wanted the context of the theory behind Esperanto's language preserving technique laid out before you explained in greater logistical detail about how you would "save some of the grammatical features found in very rare languages/lesser used languages to preserve humankind's linguistic heritage." Hoogamagoo 1 person has voted this message useful |
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