Esperanto is finding new life online
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Esperanto is finding new life online
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Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#2It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto.
If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto.
Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pretty awesome, though.
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#3It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto. If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto. Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pret…
"You live a new life for every new language you speak.
If you know only one language, you live only once."
-- Czech proverb
Dead languages like Latin and Old Greek don't add lives. You don't even speak them.
More seriously: I'm all for offering Latin, Greek, and even Esperanto but why would you give up teaching modern foreign languages? Why do you think they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto?
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#4It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto. If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto. Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pret…
As someone who knows the Polish language: I agree with you. With the Esperanto part, at least. Latin's very mentally stimulating, but more useless than a modern language, so I wouldn't quite agree with learning it.
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#5It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto. If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto. Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pret…
"You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once." -- Czech proverb Dead languages like Latin and Old Greek don't add lives. You don't even speak them. More seriously: I'm all for offering Latin, Greek, and even Esperanto but why would you give up teaching modern foreign languages? Why do you think they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto?
The key premise is that one year of mandatory classroom teaching isn't actually going to get someone speaking proficiently, unless perhaps it's something like Esperanto.
They won't be speaking Latin either, but at least some written knowledge of Latin will be useful. The basic paradigm of classroom language education started when Latin was commonly taught... and since it focused on teaching passive, literary use of the language (rather than active, oral use), that was entirely appropriate.
But superficial, passive, literary understanding of modern national languages doesn't help anyone much more than it would of Latin.
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#6Speaking of constructed languages, you might find Lojban interesting. It is "a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic." I have read most of the official language description. It's a compelling book not just about Lojban, but about logic and English grammar.
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#7All languages have a culture associated to them. It's hard to dissociate the culture from the language. Even English, which is used in different cultures, has local optimizations when it is used daily.
Latin is bound to an ancient culture (and a religious one).
Even Klingon and Quenya are bound to the universes and cultures created by their authors & fan bases.
But I don't see any culture associated with Esperanto. I'm wondering if things might be different if its proponents started associating with a niche culture (be it business) and then expand out to encompass things from everyday life. I don't know what the answer is…
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#8It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto. If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto. Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pret…
As someone who knows the Polish language: I agree with you. With the Esperanto part, at least. Latin's very mentally stimulating, but more useless than a modern language, so I wouldn't quite agree with learning it.
I think we have some strange ideas about how and why studying languages are "useful". Most Americans are monolingual English speakers, and almost by definition can't study a language that's more "useful" than English.
There are large cognitive benefits to bi- and multilingualism, but for these it doesn't actually matter what language you speak: a heritage or minority language is as good as anything else.
But the classroom model of the United States isn't actually designed to make people multilingual; if anything, it's the opposite. The default language policy of the United States is mostly to shift people to English monolingualism, no matter their circumstances, heritage, or language rights.
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#9It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto. If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto. Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pret…
"You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once." -- Czech proverb Dead languages like Latin and Old Greek don't add lives. You don't even speak them. More seriously: I'm all for offering Latin, Greek, and even Esperanto but why would you give up teaching modern foreign languages? Why do you think they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto?
I'll be more bold than panglott... we can't "give up" teaching modern foreign languages, because we already don't teach modern foreign languages.
I took four years of high school French, and got decent grades. I recently started reviewing and learning more through flashcards in Anki. On the one hand, the fours years of "study" put enough French in my head that I'm making progress this way... on the other hand, as I continue making what is frankly a great deal more progress with the spaced-repitition than I ever made in school I still can't help but notice I still can not fluently read much of anything, let alone speak or hear it.
Now, as it is common on the Internet to confuse saying something is true with advocating for that fact, let me say that A: I still think learning a language is a good idea, I just don't think what we have now can actually be called "learning a language" and B: if we were ever allowed to change The Holy Curriculum [1], there's probably more effective ways to teach a foreign language. I can't help but notice that my Anki-based studies are wildly more effective than what I tried to do in school. (They're also still inadequate on their own so far. No contradiction there... my schooling was even more inadequate, you see.) Four years of a properly-researched and developed language program, with proper software support, might have produced someone at least capable of using the language at the end.
[1]: A phrase I am settling in on to indicate my contempt for the idea that we need to deeply reform education, but we must do so under the constraint that nobody is ever allowed to remove, add, reorder, or change anything we do, ever.
Re: Esperanto is finding new life online
#10It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto. If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto. Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pret…
The point is that many students continue learning that language past that one year. It's much better to give students practical skills in a living language.