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Esperanto is finding new life online

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Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#51

Post by iamcurious »

freehunter wrote: post #42
Red_Tarsius wrote: post #24

I've always thought Esperanto to be an incredibly bad idea. http://xkcd.com/927/?cmpid=pscau

Esperanto has some incredibly good aspects to it, though. The biggest, of course, is that learning Esperanto (which is very easy to do) helps tremendously with learning other languages. So it doesn't really matter if you think Esperanto is an incredibly bad idea, Esperanto is an incredibly good idea if you're looking to learn other languages afterwards. It's not just another standard. It's a great learning aid. "A gr…

Interesting. Naturally, that only gives me more questions. Is the effect limited to French? For instance, is it also a good for learning Chinese? Is the effect stronger of weaker than learning a romance language for the same amount of time before learning French? This[1] cite from Wikipedia seems to hint so. I'm not sure how trustworthy it is. But even then, it raises the question of how much of the effect depends on having better motivated teachers.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040301110515/http://www.educati...

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#52

Post by iamcurious »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #35
lamby wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Surely the real problem is that learning Esperanto means you can now talk to people who, well, are the kind of people who learnt Esperanto...

http://xkcd.com/191/

I'm surprised no one has made a here-is-the-right-xkcd-comic-for-this-situation bot.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#53

Post by tokenadult »

woah wrote: post #44
tokenadult wrote: post #40

From the article: "Four people had been listed as 'attending' on the Facebook page for the event, but by the time the meeting began, eight Esperantists were sitting in a rough semicircle of dormroom couches and hard plastic chairs." Ladies and gentlemen, that is in New York City, where a social club meeting on almost any topic might be expected to attract more attendance. Esperanto has severe growth problems if that…

Are you saying that Esperanto is harder to learn than English, Chinese, or Spanish?

Are you saying that Esperanto is harder to learn than English, Chinese, or Spanish?

Yes, definitely, depending on what language the learner has as a native language, and especially if active speaking and listening is included as part of the test of language proficiency to an equivalent level.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#54

Post by tokenadult »

panglott wrote: post #48
tokenadult wrote: post #40

From the article: "Four people had been listed as 'attending' on the Facebook page for the event, but by the time the meeting began, eight Esperantists were sitting in a rough semicircle of dormroom couches and hard plastic chairs." Ladies and gentlemen, that is in New York City, where a social club meeting on almost any topic might be expected to attract more attendance. Esperanto has severe growth problems if that…

Esperanto is a "failure" only if help up to standards and goals that are completely unrealistic. Compare English: Britain spread it throughout a global empire for centuries. America is the world's fourth most populous country, possibly the most powerful and prosperous country in the history of the world, and nearly entirely monolingual in English. India is the world's second most populous country, where English is th…

You have just related a lot of facts that show that English is a success as a world interlanguage. The British Empire has barely existed during my lifetime, and the great majority of people now living were born after its demise. English has a majority of speakers who live outside the "inner circle" on English-speaking countries, and a very widespread use of English is as an interlangauge among persons all of whom are not native speakers of English. I have seen numerous conversations in English in the country of Taiwan among people who grew up in various countries of Asia where English is not a native language, and I hear news reports literally every day with interviews in English from people all over the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Geographical_...

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#55

Post by tokenadult »

panglott wrote: post #49
freehunter wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I put that into Google Translate and it detects it as Japanese. It then translates it into English as "Gonba~tsu Te, ne!" So I have no idea what you're saying.

Good lord, Google Translate is even worse with Japanese than I remember. Sorry! This is a very common phrase in Japanese, that comes up all the time. It means something like "Please work very hard", but it's meant to be very encouraging!

You misspelled your Japanese. In Chinese characters the term is "頑張って," and in kana it is "がんばって." Google Translate did the best it could with what you wrote.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#56

Post by awakeasleep »

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…

Constructing things with compasses was the only time I remember doing any creative problem solving in my whole school career.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#57

Post by ajkjk »

panglott wrote: post #50
ajkjk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this. There's this common argument that prescribes utility to studying Latin via the value you gain by understanding biological, legal, and religious terminology. I think that the net utility that you gain through this mechanism is approximately zero. Or rather, the net utility over other, more direct methods of acquiring this knowledge is zero. I think you could gain the requisite understanding of La…

Certainly it is much more valuable to teach kids language early on, beginning in primary school. Dual immersion schools seem to be very successful at teaching bilingualism. The problem is that in the US, the status quo is instead minimal classroom language education very late. Arguably, you could say that about many bodies of knowledge as much as Latin. The question is really: What percentage of people take that mand…

That's fair. I think I agree with your ordering. Our language education really is abysmal. Only Spanish really has a good chance of catching on outside of the classroom since it is gaining prominence in American culture (in my observation).

I do think that if all language programs are bad at a school then bad-Spanish would still have a higher utility than bad-Latin.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#58

Post by splat »

It's not often mentioned as a reason to learn Esperanto, but the literature of Esperanto is really quite wonderful and makes learning the language well worth it. I've only read a handful of books in Esperanto so far, but it has been an excellent way to read first-hand accounts of people writing about their own cultures and experiences.

Last night I finished reading Vikitmoj (Victims) by Julio Baghy. The book is a semi-autobiographical story of the author's experiences in a Siberian prisoner of war camp after WWI. It's a fascinating glimpse into life in these camps and how the different populations (POWs, soldiers, peasants, Jews, bolsheviks, etc.) all interacted with each other. As an example, one practice Baghy writes of is a kind of "duel" that the POWs would sometimes engage in between each other. (In the book it came out that one of the POWs had been sleeping with the wife of another of the POWs back before they had been captured.) They weren't allowed weapons, so they had to be a little creative. They would draw lots and the loser would have to provoke the soldiers on one of their marches so that the soldiers would beat him (sometimes to death).

If you learn any national language, you'll be able to read people in a handful of cultures write about themselves in their own words. But one of the unique features of Esperanto is that after you learn it, you can read the works of people in cultures all across the globe without the need of a translator as intermediary. (Of course the subset of people in a culture who write in Esperanto is not representative of the general population, but it's better than nothing!) In particular, many of these works haven't been translated into English (or any other language for that matter), so you would have no way to read them otherwise anyway!

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#59

Post by ajkjk »

awakeasleep wrote: post #56
ajkjk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Constructing things with compasses was the only time I remember doing any creative problem solving in my whole school career.

That may be true, but there are other ways of doing creating problem solving in mathematics that aren't as .. specialized. I'd rather figure out how to teach fields to get you that experience more effectively on more generally useful problems, than regress to proxying a math education with a compass-construction education. [seriously, if you read those old Harvard entrance exams from the 1800s, more than half math is compass problems.]

I actually got to do lots of creative problem solving somehow, but I understand how many did not. Coding is where that really took off but I did math contests and stuff when I was younger.

Re: Esperanto is finding new life online

#60

Post by freehunter »

iamcurious wrote: post #51
freehunter wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Esperanto has some incredibly good aspects to it, though. The biggest, of course, is that learning Esperanto (which is very easy to do) helps tremendously with learning other languages. So it doesn't really matter if you think Esperanto is an incredibly bad idea, Esperanto is an incredibly good idea if you're looking to learn other languages afterwards. It's not just another standard. It's a great learning aid. "A gr…

Interesting. Naturally, that only gives me more questions. Is the effect limited to French? For instance, is it also a good for learning Chinese? Is the effect stronger of weaker than learning a romance language for the same amount of time before learning French? This[1] cite from Wikipedia seems to hint so. I'm not sure how trustworthy it is. But even then, it raises the question of how much of the effect depends on…

Logically Esperanto would give you a bigger boost in European languages, since it's a European based language. However, if the innovation is in teaching methods, you might also see a boost in other languages as well, though I wouldn't expect nearly as much.
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