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Esperanto a waste of time? | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5311 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes  Speaks: Swedish* | Message 289 of 351 22 November 2010 at 9:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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There is a fundamental flaw in arguing that "Esperanto is easy to learn". Just because the grammar is simple, that doesn't make it easy to learn for the vast majority of people. Normal people learn languages by travelling to countries where they speak them, enroll in classes, watch movies and TV series, read comics and books, listen to songs etc. All of those are much harder in Esperanto than almost any other language. That easily outweighs any advantages that the "simple grammar" confers.
Also, the most important thing when studying languages, more important than grammatical simplicity and even more important than methods is motivation. People fail because they lose motivation. This is the biggest problem for Esperanto, only a handful of enthusiasts and utopians can motivate themselves to learning such a tiny language. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5110 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 290 of 351 22 November 2010 at 10:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've been following this discussion for quite some time and actually toyed with the idea of learning it, but eventually decided against it.
Here's my reasoning: 1. Esperanto makes studying other languages easier Esperantist often cite studies claiming that learning Esperanto makes learning other languages easier. I don't doubt that research, but since I already learned a number of languages from different language families, I doubt that learning Esperanto would help me in that respect. 2. Esperanto is faster and easier to learn than language X Esperantist often give examples of learners who achieved better fluency in Esperanto than for example in English. Again, this wouldn't help me. 3. Pasporta Servo Being able to use Pasporta Servo would definitely be an advantage, but since the advent of couch surfing this is also a moot point. Besides, I wouldn't want to be accepted into someone's home just because I believe in a "common cause," no matter how benevolent. 4. Relative scarcity of interesting original works written in Esperanto I really enjoy reading foreign books in their original languages and, AFAIK, Esperanto doesn't have much to offer in this respect. Sure, I could probably join web sites and communicate with other fellow Esperantists all over the world, but to me that's akin to living in a bubble. So why should I learn Esperanto??? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6260 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 291 of 351 22 November 2010 at 12:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Doitsujin, see my previous post about how Esperanto is helping me progress beyond an
intermediate level in Chinese, and a few examples of how it helps with Swahili. Traveling with Pasporta Servo is a much different experience than traveling with Couchsurfing, but it's not really something I want to belabor again. Suffice it to say that if someone doesn't share the common idea that "peaceful coexistence of diverse cultures is good" then I don't care to stay with him. And that's all there is to the interna ideo, because beliefs among Esperantists run the gamut from libertarians on the one extreme to marxists on the other extreme, even if most are neither the one nor the other. Same with religion (or lack of it), all flavors are present. As for interesting original works, there can't be any talk of scarcity. I recommend getting the book "Concise Encyclopedia of the Original Literature of Esperanto" by Geoffrey Sutton, who holds Phd's in Scandinavian as well as Finno-Ugrian literature. The book is 740 pages; it's called "concise" because several possibly worthy authors complained of not being mentioned. All the major literature movements are covered though. I'd say the book is worth getting for the excerpts of Kalocsay etc. alone; some older works are drowned out in the newer writings, which have much broader avenues of publication, but Sutton reliably picks out the most worthwhile works and makes them available to an English-speaking audience for the first time. If the local university library doesn't have the book, it's definitely available from Amazon. Edited by Sprachprofi on 22 November 2010 at 12:08pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5110 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 292 of 351 22 November 2010 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I glad that Esperanto works this way for you, but anybody who studies many different languages is bound to notice similarities between langagues. For example, in your new thread you compare the Arabic female ending -a to the Esperanto equivalent -ino. However, by the same token you could have simply compared Arabic to Spanish.
It seems that I underestimated the prolificness of Esperantists. Do you happen to know if the works of any of the authors included in this book have been translated into other languages? (I'd like get an idea of what their writing style is like.) Out of curiosity, is there any fiction or non-fiction book originally written in Esperanto whose translation became an international bestseller? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Enriquee Triglot Groupie United States esperantofre.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5125 days ago 51 posts - 125 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Esperanto, English | Message 293 of 351 22 November 2010 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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jeff_lindqvist wrote:
>I still attribute my "success" with Esperanto to my overall >"language intuition" rather than that it's "easy to learn". I do believe that some people can learn languages faster than others. Because my ear isn't good for most languages I came to appreciate how much a good ear help to learn the spoken language. I followed the learning of English of at least 100 South-Americans from the time they reached New York City. (including myself) My wife has one of the best hearing capability in the group. I am at the other end. A good hearing for English helps to learn the spoken language. I don't believe it helps much to learn the written language. >Now you're talking about several things such as >economy and the education system, as well as your >own difficulties with English. Yes. Economy is fundamental on the individual possibility to learn a language. If you don't have enough money to eat every day, you cannot afford an English course. Materials or books to learn Esperanto are much cheaper. You can learn Esperanto from a book (I did, one book) you cannot learn English from one book. If I have had the possibility to pay for an English course, the time to learn it could have been reduced ... still longer than to learn Esperanto without that many resources. >People in general probably aren't (as) interested in >languages (as we). I agree. But you need to be interested and you need the resources to learn that language. >It's literally everywhere. No. It is not. >It's hard to pinpoint why so many people in the north of >Europe seem to speak English well. I suppose that ears trained to the local languages of that region, are better equipped to hear English. That doesn't happen to people of most countries in Europe. Better living conditions and proximity to countries with other languages could also be an incentive. >from differences in phonemes (big or small) and prosody >down to the "Me hungry." kind of English (which, albeit >"incorrect", still is understandable). It is very frustrating when you ask for soup and you get soap. I was lucky I never needed to ask for a bed sheet. >I think there is so much in your argumentation that has >more to do with your personal issues and experiences >with English (for various reasons) than the magic of >Esperanto. You said it ... my experience. I immigrated to New York City, USA, in 1963. when it was much easier to enter the country ... legally or not. During my first decade there, I saw how other immigrants, more that a hundred of them, were learning English, how long it took them to be able to use the language. Even today, you can find in USA millions of people that cannot communicate in English, or they do that very poorly. I live in "Silicone Valley" where many people came to work in anything related to computers. They came from China, India, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, ... Those workers mostly can get around in English, not their spouses or parents. I teach Esperanto by email. I see the reactions of my students. They sound very surprised the first time they write or speak in Esperanto ... after only 20 - 50 hours of study. Most start writing short paragraphs (with mistakes, but understandable) within 5 - 10 hours. (I am talking only about those students that care to learn) I know the feeling. I was also very surprised when after seeing Esperanto only in the written form during 2 months I was able to keep a several-hour conversation the second day I had the chance to hear spoken Esperanto. >One can't say that English is difficult, that it takes many >many years to achieve conversational skills etc. etc. just >as one can't say that Esperanto is easy, that it takes only >months to be able to converse and so on. Yes. I can say that, from my experience ... always speaking about most of them, not all of them. And don't forget that languages have spoken and written forms. Learning a language means to know the 4 ways: The language you speak, the language you write, the one that you listen to, and the one that you read. Gorgoll2 from Brazil wrote: >But, it exists problems: No language is perfect, not even Esperanto. >Zammenhof´s diacritics don´t help and the equivallent´s >aren´t estetic. Is this coming from a Brazilian? Esperanto has 5 diacritical letters. I just counted 12 in the Portuguese alphabet. á, â, ã, à, é, ê, í, ó, ô, õ, ú, ç I hope you don't quit using Portuguese because of this letters. If you are going to judge a language for how beautiful its written form looks, you should be studying Chinese calligraphy, or Japanese, Arabic, or some of the Indian languages. They look much beautiful than Esperanto, English, or Portuguese. >Esperanto is based in the most understood languages >of the age of its creation - Your Latin and Greek words >are a example. I don't know how truth this is, but it sure helps Esperanto to be easy to learn. >The ideology of Esperanto in´t accepted for the world. Esperanto is a language. It is a tool for communication. It has not "ideology". Maybe you are speaking about the ideology of some of its speakers. >But, though not as IAL, Esperanto is good, but at your way. I am sorry. I cannot understand this sentence. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6260 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 294 of 351 22 November 2010 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Last time I mentioned the -ino suffix, forum members said that it was weird to use for family members and that no other language does that (German only uses -in for professions). Hence, I was happy to discover it used just like that in Arabic to distinguish between not just grandfather/grandmother but also husband/wife etc. It's still the weakest example; the others I'm quite sure don't exist in other common European languages, yet Esperanto, which is based on European languages, has a whole bunch of these features. Don't you think it's interesting?
It seems that I underestimated the prolificness of Esperantists. Do you happen to know if the works of any of the authors included in this book have been translated into other languages? (I'd like get an idea of what their writing style is like.) Out of curiosity, is there any fiction or non-fiction book originally written in Esperanto whose translation became an international bestseller? [/QUOTE] It is not very common to translate Esperanto works because anyone could learn to appreciate them in the original so quickly; any translations have to be worse. Anyway there are a few translations of the most well-known writers if you look for them. The problem is that they weren't done systematically, e. g. Julio Baghy's masterpiece "Spring in Autumn" can be found in Hungarian and Chinese (translated by Ba Jin, himself a very well-known Chinese writer) but not in English. Some of Kalocsay's poems are now available in a 18-language compilation ("En nacia vesto") that you may be able to locate, and there's one ("En amara horo") that I know of which is available online in English (here). Note that you can also refer to large parts of the encyclopedia of Esperanto literature through Google Books, but pages with excerpts of works seem to have been deliberately left out, probably due to complex copyright. If you can get a hold of the book, look up "Papilio" on page 586 for example; I love that poem. The most well-known work that was originally in Esperanto is probably the long poem "The infant race" by William Auld, for which the author was nominated for the Nobel prize in literature. You can find it in many translations at http://www.everk.it/index.php?id=31,120,0,0,1,0 however I must say I don't like Auld's writings nearly as much as some other authors'. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Enriquee Triglot Groupie United States esperantofre.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5125 days ago 51 posts - 125 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Esperanto, English | Message 295 of 351 22 November 2010 at 7:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Gusutafu wrote:
>There is a fundamental flaw in arguing that "Esperanto >is easy to learn". Just because the grammar is simple, >that doesn't make it easy to learn for the vast majority >of people. "Esperanto is easy to learn" just because most of the Esperanto speakers learned the language in a very short time compared to what could have taken to learn another language. >Normal people learn languages by travelling to countries >where they speak them, enroll in classes, watch movies >and TV series, read comics and books, listen to songs I don't know what you call "normal people". Most people in the world don't have access to those things. Maybe you are talking about rich people. (for many people in the world, "rich" means people that eats at least 3 meals every day) >All of those are much harder in Esperanto than almost >any other language. All that I needed to learn Esperanto was a book borrowed from the public library. Yes, I am not "normal people". >That easily outweighs any advantages that the "simple >grammar" confers. Simple grammar could be a factor, but the only thing that matters is how long takes to be able to use the language. Esperanto takes a lot less time than other languages, even without traveling, movies, music, classes, etc. Just in the time you need to prepare a trip, you could have learned the language to the point that you could be able to use it. Knowing Esperanto helps to prepare your traveling. You could contact Esperanto speakers in many countries that could show you around the places you like to visit ... in company of local people, or at least, they could tell you which "tourist traps" to avoid, and recommend places that only locals know. >the most important thing when studying languages, >is motivation. I agree. You lack the motivation. I didn't. I spend a short time learning Esperanto, and 51 years using and enjoying the use of Esperanto. But I also wanted to learn English. I even trans-located to New York City, and learning English took me for ever. >This is the biggest problem for Esperanto, (motivation) ... and all the other languages. Most language students quit before being able to use the language ... including Esperanto students. But if an Esperanto student can stick during 50 hours, that would be enough to start using the language. Other languages need a lot more time. Here I need to explain that a Chinese student need many more hours than those that I have mentioned. But that student also needs many more hours to learn any other language. >only a handful of enthusiasts and utopians can motivate >themselves How "enthusiast and Utopian" need somebody to be to study any other language? People learn Esperanto because they want to communicate with people from other countries, and to learn about cultures from other countries. If you spend 10 years learning Chinese, you can learn culture from China. Another 10 years for Japanese, and you can learn culture from Japan. Another 10 years ... With a few months of Esperanto, you can visit and learn the culture from almost every country in the world. >to learning such a tiny language. I don't know what means "tiny language". Esperanto has more speakers than most of the 6000 languages in the world. Maybe 100 out of 6000 have more speakers than Esperanto. Most languages have speakers in only one region in the world. Esperanto has speakers almost in every country. I believe that there aren't even 50 languages which have more books, magazines, or web pages than Esperanto. We are talking about more than 6000 languages in total. Doitsujin wrote: >1. Esperanto makes studying other languages easier >since I already learned a number of languages from >different language families, I doubt that learning >Esperanto would help me in that respect. You maybe right. The big help is for people not so much into language learning. Still could help a little, but maybe will not justify the invested time in your case ... if learning other languages would be your only use for Esperanto. >2. Esperanto is faster and easier to learn than language X >Esperantist often give examples of learners who >achieved better fluency in Esperanto than for example >in English. Again, this wouldn't help me. Esperanto could be learned in a short time compared to any other language. This is very efficient if you are going to use Esperanto. Would be lost time if you refuse to use Esperanto. 3. Pasporta Servo >I wouldn't want to be accepted into someone's home >just because I believe in a "common cause," no matter >how benevolent. You should keep a dialog with possible hosts before your trip. If you find some rapport, you could accept the invitation. If you find nothing in common ... you can keep searching. >So why should I learn Esperanto??? At this point it seems impossible to get you to accept the value of Esperanto. Generally the value of Esperanto is found while using it, not before that. People tend not to believe in the experience (or judgment) of other people. Would you please read this article?: http://esperantofre.com/book/index.h tm#piron (make sure there aren't spaces in the previous line) Edited by Enriquee on 22 November 2010 at 7:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5311 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 296 of 351 22 November 2010 at 10:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's not really true now, is it? I'm willing to bet there are several billion people who subscribe to the idea you mention, whereas only a handful of them are esperantist. There are surely many times more people with those views on couchsurfing, than there are pasportists. In fact, there are 2.3 million couchsurfers now, very few of whom are probably culture chauvinists. So limiting your options to Esperantists severely diminishes your choice. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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