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Esperanto is finding new life online

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Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#21

Post by ajkjk »

panglott wrote: post #2

It'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…

I'm honestly surprised to learn that anyone defends learning Latin outside of academic scholarship. I guess I feel the same about Greek but no one learns that in the US so it's less argued about.

I took Latin in high school and felt that I wasted four years I could have spent learning (rudimentary) Spanish, or at least something that had any cultural relevance at all. You have to find a way to make kids care about it as well as justifying its utility.

I see Latin and Greek education as historical relics, akin to how we used to emphasizing testing students' ability to construct shapes with compasses and straightedges, or their ability to memorize bible verses.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#22

Post by klipt »

psychometry wrote: post #10
panglott wrote: post #2

It'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.

There's research showing that one year of Esperanto followed by three of French leads to greater French fluency than four years of French: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#23

Post by panglott »

psychometry wrote: post #19
panglott wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of American high-school students who take their mandatory year of foreign language continue on to speak that language proficiently and competently? What "practical skills"? The supposed economic value from learning modern national languages is wildly overstated, for English monolinguals. It's better to learn languages because learning languages is valuable for its own sake, and pick the language you l…

Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition. What's wildly overstated is the benefit learning Latin has on anything other than taking the SAT. Studying French is much more beneficial to speaking French than studying Latin and I shouldn't have to explain why that is the case.

The mandatory minumum year of foreign language is already outside the "critical period hypothesis" anyway.

If you buy the critical period hypothesis anyway, which I do not.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#25

Post by panglott »

psychometry wrote: post #19
panglott wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of American high-school students who take their mandatory year of foreign language continue on to speak that language proficiently and competently? What "practical skills"? The supposed economic value from learning modern national languages is wildly overstated, for English monolinguals. It's better to learn languages because learning languages is valuable for its own sake, and pick the language you l…

Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition. What's wildly overstated is the benefit learning Latin has on anything other than taking the SAT. Studying French is much more beneficial to speaking French than studying Latin and I shouldn't have to explain why that is the case.

The thing is, in this country in the last decade or two, we've seen the rise of dual-language immersion schools that are actually effective at teaching bilingualism. These are mostly English-Spanish, but there are French immersion schools in Louisiana, and indigenous language schools for Cherokee, Hawaiian, &c. This method of language education actually seems to produce children who are bilingual in both languages; they are a major advance in language education in the United States, and they should be wholeheartedly supported.

The "mandatory one year of foreign language in high school" is a relic of decades past when Latin and Greek were widely taught, and that is what they are mostly what they are suited for. It is just as much a relic as Latin is.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#26

Post by psychometry »

klipt wrote: post #22
psychometry wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's research showing that one year of Esperanto followed by three of French leads to greater French fluency than four years of French: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto

Those studies included tutelage in the structure of language as part of their Esperanto instruction, so the same benefit might exist simply by modifying students' language curricula.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#27

Post by panglott »

ajkjk wrote: post #21
panglott wrote: post #2

It'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…

I'm honestly surprised to learn that anyone defends learning Latin outside of academic scholarship. I guess I feel the same about Greek but no one learns that in the US so it's less argued about. I took Latin in high school and felt that I wasted four years I could have spent learning (rudimentary) Spanish, or at least something that had any cultural relevance at all. You have to find a way to make kids care about it…

On a day to day basis, the average American is simply actually a lot likelier to encounter Latin biological nomenclature or legal or religious terminology than, say, a fluent conversation in German.

The United States is largely monolingual in English for a thousand miles, and the language ideology here causes immigrants to want their children to shift to English monolingualism as quickly as possible. And thus bad Latin is more useful than bad German.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#28

Post by Red_Tarsius »

ajkjk wrote: post #21
panglott wrote: post #2

It'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…

I'm honestly surprised to learn that anyone defends learning Latin outside of academic scholarship. I guess I feel the same about Greek but no one learns that in the US so it's less argued about. I took Latin in high school and felt that I wasted four years I could have spent learning (rudimentary) Spanish, or at least something that had any cultural relevance at all. You have to find a way to make kids care about it…

> ...something that had any cultural relevance at all.

My high school was heavily focused on Latin and ancient Greek. We spent the first two years grokking grammar and semantics. Then, in liceo (the last 3 years) we would study history by translating and studying poems, speeches, plays...

Teacher and students used to discuss for hours about the meaning and context of this or that sentence. It was a wonderful way to understand our ancestors' mindset. Dead languages are the best tools for a deeper appreciation of history.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#29

Post by rmxt »

martinrue wrote: post #18

For anyone interested in learning a little more about Esperanto, Duolingo just put their Esperanto course into public beta and there's a good amount of learning content already: https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto-Online . There's also http://lernu.net , probably the most well-known source of Esperanto news, lessons and other stuff. Amuziĝu!

Came here to share the good news about Esperanto on Duolingo, too!

Duolingo is fantastic and I am addicted to keeping my streak alive. However, I find the lack of variety and relative rigidity of the sentences to be offputting over time. I've nearly completed two trees, and have been a pretty consistent user over the past 3 years, so sometimes the monotony of the sentences drags me down. I have to imagine that we (collectively) are very close to having a sentence generator that can throw together a pertinent and sensical verb phrase and noun phrase that differs just slightly from the curated/created sentences, at least for the Indo-European languages.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#30

Post by schoen »

panglott wrote: post #25
psychometry wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition. What's wildly overstated is the benefit learning Latin has on anything other than taking the SAT. Studying French is much more beneficial to speaking French than studying Latin and I shouldn't have to explain why that is the case.

The thing is, in this country in the last decade or two, we've seen the rise of dual-language immersion schools that are actually effective at teaching bilingualism. These are mostly English-Spanish, but there are French immersion schools in Louisiana, and indigenous language schools for Cherokee, Hawaiian, &c. This method of language education actually seems to produce children who are bilingual in both languages; t…

Another popular bilingual immersion option is English-Mandarin. I know people here in San Francisco who have kids doing bilingual Mandarin immersion, apparently with good results. I love Latin and Latin teaching, support its availability, and think it's benefited me and other students who were given the opportunity to learn Latin, but I think you're right that the recent modern-language immersion trend is incredibly valuable and deserving of support. We should want language teaching to be effective and beneficial for students.

There's nothing on the scale of full-time immersion, nor is there likely to be, but there's now a small minority of Latin teachers who are presenting Latin as a spoken language, including using Latin as the language of instruction and attempting to apply modern language pedagogical techniques like Total Physical Response. So even some Latin teachers might agree with your criticism of the less-holistic teaching styles and the distance they put between students and the language.

Edit: I didn't notice that you were also advocating teaching Latin further up in the thread.

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