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Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

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Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#21

Post by nickincardone »

> He said that if he could have chosen a language, instead of English, to be the world’s shared second language, then it would be Swahili or colloquial Indonesian.

I've learned Swahili to a basic conversational level and my experience learning the language mirrors the author's time picking up Esperanto. Grammatically, everything seems to make sense especially the simplicity of the verbs, and as a native English speaker you can pretty much pronounce/hear all the sounds from the jump. However, once you get deeper into the language you have to worry about the extreme amount of noun classes (think genders). In Swahili there are 8+ depending how you count them. These noun classes change the prefixes on the adjectives and verbs around them which can cause major confusion. I've always thought if they condensed these noun classes to 1 or 2 then Swahili would be the simplest language in the world.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#22

Post by shimonabi »

I started learning Mandarin in December with a Taiwanese teacher that teaches at a university in my tiny country. We have classes for an hour and a half every week online. She forces us to read the sentences in simplified characters, not just to know what the pinyin words mean. It's not easy.

I never had any interest in learning an invented language, other than those I use for programming.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#23

Post by prmoustache »

zozbot234 wrote: post #18
anthk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Spanish it's almost dumb simple, widely spoken; and Iberian Spanish has few exceptions (the c/z/s spelling split avoid spawning a nazi grammar every two paragraphs as it happens in South American Spanish), and yet, he chose... Indonesian. At Iberia, Spanish was almost the lingua franca between the Occitan branch speakers, the Galician-Portuguese speakers and the Leonese/Asturian ones in the Middle Ages and beyo…

Spanish has inflectional grammar, which is the one language feature most constructed languages do away with first (with weird exceptions like Volapük that are mostly known for their obscurity) because it's so hard to learn for newcomers.

What does it means?

EDIT: how you mean how papá (daddy) is different from papa (the pope)? Yes as a french that is my main difficulty with spanish.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#24

Post by hipaa_eng »

nickincardone wrote: post #21

> He said that if he could have chosen a language, instead of English, to be the world’s shared second language, then it would be Swahili or colloquial Indonesian. I've learned Swahili to a basic conversational level and my experience learning the language mirrors the author's time picking up Esperanto. Grammatically, everything seems to make sense especially the simplicity of the verbs, and as a native English speak…

as a swahili speaker I'd say that the beauty of swahili is that it's commonplace to butcher these noun classes unless you're from Tanzania. Kenyans, Congolese, Ugandas do it all the time

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#25

Post by prmoustache »

materielle wrote: post #20
anthk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Spanish it's almost dumb simple, widely spoken; and Iberian Spanish has few exceptions (the c/z/s spelling split avoid spawning a nazi grammar every two paragraphs as it happens in South American Spanish), and yet, he chose... Indonesian. At Iberia, Spanish was almost the lingua franca between the Occitan branch speakers, the Galician-Portuguese speakers and the Leonese/Asturian ones in the Middle Ages and beyo…

Spanish is easy except for those pesky conjugations. But, do you know how hard it is to fluidly conjugate into 50 verb forms in spoken speech? Plus, people gloss over this fact, but Spanish is highly inflected. After you choose 1 out of 50 conjugation for your form, you have to choose a gender for your noun, and inflect your adjectives by number and gender. Conceptually, it’s not difficult. But if you open your mouth…

Yes but conjugations is not something you have to worry about, especially at the beginning.

In a language with articles, you can do mistakes in conjugation, yet if you use the article people will understand what/who is the subject and still understand.

When you learn a language, focus on present tense. By using words like before/after/yesterday/tomorrow you can keep using present tense and be understood by a native speaker and you are likely to learn quickly the past and present tense by listening to their answers. People usually understand that you are learning and don't mind you using present tense.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#26

Post by HKH2 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #14
adastra22 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the beauties of Esperanto being constructed is that the letters only make one sound and not like 2-4 That's true of almost every language though, just not English.

> That's true of almost every language though This is an exaggeration. It’s definitely not true of French, Spanish, or German. Honorable mention for languages like Chinese that don’t even have the concept of “letter”.

Spanish and German are far more consistent than English. Mandarin Chinese has Pinyin which is modern and quite consistent - Pinyin is very useful because you can type it and select the corresponding Chinese characters.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#27

Post by retrac »

herculity275 wrote: post #3

> He said that if he could have chosen a language, instead of English, to be the world’s shared second language, then it would be Swahili or colloquial Indonesian. He said both of these languages have been learned by millions of people as their second language, so all the weird edge-cases have worn away, and they are as smooth and beautiful as a river stone. No weird grammar. No weird tones. No exceptions. I have no…

Most people who speak Swahili speak it as a second language. This process - when the majority of speakers of a language are non-native - tends to simplify a language. For example, Swahili has a much simpler set of sounds than most other Bantu languages, many of which are tonal (Swahili is not tonal), and many of which have three or four way contrasts in their stop consonants (Swahili has two), and some of which have click consonants (Swahili has few "unusual" sounds).

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#28

Post by senkora »

zozbot234 wrote: post #12

> And oh my god! It’s fascinating! The language [Esperanto] is so well designed! Everything made sense and with each new thing I learned, I thought “That’s brilliant!” Not sure if serious? Obligatory link to JBR's "Bad Language" Ranto: http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/

^This seems to have been downvoted for tone. Fair enough, but I do encourage anyone with an interest in Esperanto to read the linked document. It is a classic post on the complexities of Esperanto that are not obvious to the casual learner, that contains quite a lot of insight.

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#29

Post by yuck39 »

Not sure if OP is the author but my love of learning languages was also unlocked through Esperanto when I was a teenager.

Its possible that my journey has been a bit longer, I did eventually get around to studying Mandarin Chinese, From 2016 until present day I still study an hour every day. I also was able to live in China for a year which was a great help.

Going from Esperanto, a language designed as a second language, to Chinese, one that is absolutely not, is like going from Ruby on Rails development to writing a web server in Assembly. There is so much more practice and rote memorization required to attain any level of fluency.

After over 7 years of study I still speak with an accent and have trouble communicating on some topics. But at this point I can read just about anything which was always my primary goal :).

Re: Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

#30

Post by Graziano_M »

I learned Esperanto years ago, not because I wanted to speak the language, but because I heard that students who learned it had an easier time picking up third languages, to the point that they'd surpass those who had been learning that 3rd language (as their second) the whole time! It seems that that strong of a claim has been since removed from Wikipedia, and I am skeptical about it as well. I wish I had spent the time just learning Italian from the get-go.

Also, like Derek, I was turned off by the community. I found them way too socialist-leaning idealists.

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