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Esperanto a waste of time? | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5136 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes  Speaks: Spanish* | Message 273 of 351 18 November 2010 at 12:06am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't know. If there was some sort of "Jewish agenda" behind it, then Esperanto would feel weightier, more substantive, and even be interesting.
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| KokoWow Newbie Slovenia Joined 4912 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: Slovenian* | Message 274 of 351 18 November 2010 at 12:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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Juan, with Jews the Bible had a central place in their culture. Hundred years ago internationalists tried to establish Esperanto, but the problem was that they weren't concentrated in one place. People follow the path of least resistance. If you have a bunch of people that don't speak a common language, it's easy to introduce a language that they all would have to learn. But since most people around the world speak at least a bit of English, that's becoming less and less viable...
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| Enriquee Triglot Groupie United States esperantofre.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5126 days ago 51 posts - 125 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Esperanto, English | Message 275 of 351 18 November 2010 at 1:30am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't understand the references to "waste of time". If you ... - spend 20 - 50 hours learning Esperanto. (for free) - communicate with people from different countries. - visit some countries and your "Esperanto friends" take you to know their towns, offer you a place to stay at their homes, help you visit places outside the regular "tourist traps" ... - receive some visitors from other countries and show them around your town. - read books and magazines in Esperanto by authors from other cultures. (You will find thousands of them in the web) - visit other countries, and even when the official language is English, or one of the languages that you have learned, it is much easier to make friends with Esperanto speakers. - find it easier to learn another language. - your "Esperanto friends" from the concerning country help you practice your new language. Which part of this list is the "waste of time"? In the USA millions of children "learn" Spanish in School. Very few, if any, reach a level to be able to use Spanish. Even those that could communicate in school-learned Spanish, don't find many opportunities to use it. Maybe that is a "waste of time" (and money). Spanish is my first language, and I wish that the whole world would speak Spanish ... but that is not the case. Many people say that most of the people of the world understand English. That also, is not the case. Many people in the USA have a hard time understanding spoken Australian or The-Queen's-English. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6700 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 276 of 351 18 November 2010 at 1:31am | IP Logged | |||||
Some esperantists do, I'm told. The teacher we had (a Swedish guy) is raising his kid(s) in Esperanto. People active in the "Esperanto community" probably know of more examples. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5312 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 277 of 351 18 November 2010 at 10:32am | IP Logged | |||||
All of it. The number of people "from different cultures" you can coomunicate with in English, which you already know, is about a thousand times greater. You can use it for travelling, reading millions of books, many of the best of which were written in English in the original. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6261 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 278 of 351 18 November 2010 at 10:49am | IP Logged | |||||
Afaik no Esperanto-speaking couple teaches their kids ONLY Esperanto, they raise them bilingually or trilingually. Hokan Lundberg is the most active male Swedish Esperanto teacher; if you mean him, he's raising his kids in Swedish, Serbian and Esperanto. I personally wouldn't even do it because it's not the purpose of Esperanto to become a native language. Also, it makes a lot more sense to me to, say, raise a kid in German and Mandarin and have him learn Esperanto later on his own; much more efficient than raising him in German and Esperanto and have him learn Mandarin later. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6700 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 279 of 351 18 November 2010 at 9:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hokan is the guy, yes. I was under the impression that he speaks Esperanto with the kids, his wife speaks Serbian, and I suppose that the kids get Swedish from friends etc.
That's interesting. What about all this "Esperanto makes you learn other languages a lot easier"? True or false? (Or just "Not for you"?) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6261 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 280 of 351 18 November 2010 at 10:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
It is true, Esperanto does make it easier to learn other languages, and I'd amend that to a lot easier if it's your first or second foreign language or if you don't have experience with both Romance and Germanic languages and your next goal is one of those. Even I still find features in exotic languages that I have trouble understanding until I realize that they're just like Esperanto. For example, I recently came across constructions like 爱怀疑的人 (love-doubt person) in Mandarin, which confused me until I thought of the Esperanto "dubema". 爱 works like an -ema suffix, and with that understanding even 爱挑毛病 makes sense. On the other side of the linguistic spectrum, I was able to map Swahili's reversive suffix -ua to the Esperanto mal-, and the causative -isha/-iza/-esha/-eza/-aulisha continuum (depending on the verb ending) easily maps to the Esperanto -igi. That doesn't mean that all possible linguistic features of all languages are going to be easier, e. g. the applicative suffix is still giving me trouble, but it certainly helps to catch a break in the middle of climbing this mountain of innovative Swahili verb modifiers. And these are just examples from the past few months. Someone who has never or rarely studied a foreign language before can get other benefits from studying Esperanto, for example a quick and painless introduction to various points of grammar that would be a whole lot harder if they were masked by the irregularities of natural languages. Also the development of study habits, which is easier when you notice progress from every week to the next. A base of European word roots. An understanding of semantics and how morphology can change the meaning of a word. For Asians, an introduction to the Latin alphabet - I pity those who learn the Latin alphabet while studying English. Even though Esperanto pronounces letters quite differently, it helps people to get a sense of the basic value of each letter before having to deal with the monster that is English orthography, and that is the base of the idea that learning a concise and logical grammar makes it easier to deal with a vast and often-illogical grammar later. Anyway, notice that all these points I'm making are for learners. I do not believe that being a native speaker of Esperanto is nearly as beneficial for your language learning. It doesn't give you the practice of learning a language, or the feeling of success when you master it, and you still won't know what fluency in a foreign language feels like (like aiming in the dark and you may wind up thinking you're fluent before you are). Apart from that though, the problem is that e. g. German native speakers have a *feel* for things like the Accusative or the meaning added by the ver- prefix, and that feel doesn't make it much easier to learn another language's Accusative or another language's prefixes. It's hard to transpose feel to a new foreign language (for the Accusative it takes the average German several steps to figure out if something should be Accusative in a new language, and it's a learned procedure, not an innate ability). Transposing knowledge is a lot easier, so those who learned the Accusative for one language will find it comparatively easy to use it in another language (the knowledge of when to use it; not talking about mastering the morphological changes). Hence I believe that most of the advantages derive from learning Esperanto rather than speaking Esperanto natively. 9 persons have voted this message useful |
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