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Esperanto a waste of time? | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6373 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 266 of 351 11 October 2010 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The concept of "wasting time" suggests to me two things: first of all, that there is some goal you want to reach that is not being furthered by the activity in question. If you want to be a lawyer, you can waste your time watching TV instead of studying, but if you want to set a record for amount of hours of TV watching, you can waste your time studying when you should be watching TV. I think any accusation that learning Esperanto is a waste of time needs to be qualified by a goal. What is the goal that is not being furthered by learning Esperanto? Certainly it's not polyglottery, as Esperanto is a very efficient language in terms of time spent to reach fluency. It has also been shown to aid in the learning of other languages. So for a goal of polyglottery, it's not a waste of time.
The second thing the concept of "wasting time" suggests to me is that the activity is not valuable in itself. Otherwise activities like art, sex and raising children are all a waste of time. I'm pretty convinced that most Esperantists find the learning of Esperanto as well as the engagement in the global Esperanto community and culture to be intrinsically valuable. So I find that Esperanto is only a waste of time if you're trying to further some goal not furthered by the study of Esperanto (and polyglottery is demonstrably not such a goal) and you additionally don't find the experience of learning the language and engaging with the Esperanto community to be valuable in itself. I expect that there are lots and lots of people encompassed by both these qualifiers, but I suspect that the thought of learning Esperanto very rarely enters the minds of such people. Edited by Ari on 11 October 2010 at 5:53pm 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6230 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 267 of 351 11 October 2010 at 9:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
Fair enough. I find that it's usually worthwhile to check or ask about gut feelings, rather than presenting them as certainties or gravely important warnings.
What's helpful to me is the mindset and skills I've learned in striving to seriously improve a language I speak fluently - further increasing vocabulary, mastery of nuances, appreciation of poetry, etc. That this language is Esperanto is irrelevant in one way (this experience would be equally valuable with any language, I suspect), but highly relevant in another (Esperanto's regularities, and my love of it, have brought me to a higher level in it than I've reached in any other non-native language. Either of those alone would be less powerful). This has clearly trumped environmental factors - I've spent 13 years (almost half of which I was too young to remember) in anglophone countries, and 12 in an Italian-speaking region, yet my Esperanto is better than my Italian. It's not Esperanto's grammar or vocabulary which is a major factor here - I have learned a handful of words which closely resemble their Italian or German counterparts through it, but not many. I believe most of this will transfer to Japanese - which I'm currently on hiatus from, as I focus on Swiss languages for a while. Thanks for the reminder to update my profile. This isn't a matter of "the more languages you've studied" - I've dabbled in quite a few, and can read books in several that I am far from conversational in. That is a significant, but different, effect. This is a matter of "the more deeply you dive into a language and the more you master it" - or at least, that's how I see it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sigiloso Heptaglot Groupie Portugal Joined 6570 days ago 87 posts - 103 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, PortugueseC1, Galician, French, Esperanto, Italian Studies: Russian, Greek | Message 269 of 351 12 November 2010 at 7:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I am afraid it is. I learnt it and am very angry with myself for the mistake. I entertained nonsense like the above but have changed my views since. I tried to explain why in a quick previous post but got deleted for censorship reasons. The reasons behind those reason are at the root of why Esperanto is a waste of time. But...I cannot explain it.
What happenned is that I came into contact with a person who had "knabeied" (left the movement -"movement" ugh-), that was disturbing to me, since there are so few proficient Esperantist and many leave or drop it, so I asked him. And .. you have to understand who does what, why. Who is interested about internationalism and leveling other's national identities, while keeping one's. I researched old texts where the agenda transpired, and turned my stomach. Bunk, I had been duped. As the Iranians were at a time, until they understood..."fina venko", ha, not in a million eons. Then I noticed what kind of few people there are, like in a certain "direction", ideological, ethnic, sexual. I complained that there being a direction goes against the claim of "neutrality", a mere means of communication. There is the question if such a thing exist. Most of the propaganda, in mere linguistic terms, is lies as well. For example, number of speakers is huuuugely overestimated. Anyway, lets say no more not to be censored. Just wrote this as charity so other dont make my mistake. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5172 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 270 of 351 12 November 2010 at 8:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
Unfortunately, you took off just enough to make your post barely comprehensible. If you have any link to similar information as that which-you-could-not-name, please post it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lucas Pentaglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 4958 days ago 85 posts - 130 votes Speaks: French*, English, German, Italian, Russian Studies: Mandarin | Message 271 of 351 13 November 2010 at 5:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
Interesting...will we all speak esperanto in the new world order? I don't know, but if it's true, my answer is still "yes, it's a waste of time to learn esperanto...we will learn it when we will be forced to learn it!" :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| KokoWow Newbie Slovenia Joined 4912 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: Slovenian* | Message 272 of 351 17 November 2010 at 11:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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To make Esperanto a viable language, it has to be done something similar to what the Jews did with Hebrew - they started speaking it and passed it onto their children as the main or only language. But I just don't see this coming...
1 person has voted this message useful |
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