Esperanto is finding new life online

Post by darklajid » Sat, May 30, 2015, 6:30 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #41

panglott wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Lat…

The real problem I run into as someone who speaks English natively and German as a second language is, outside of the Internet and reading books, I never have a chance to speak German. Even in the actual country of Germany, I speak German just bad enough that I can tell it's painful for people to listen to me struggle, and they'll quickly switch to English if they know it (which they do). The only benefit is I know w…

Post by baddox » Sat, May 30, 2015, 7:05 PM UTC

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #78

baddox wrote: post #6

Speaking 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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://mw.lojban.org/papri/the_Complete_Lojban_Language

There is a reason why human languages evolved to have syntactic ambiguity: better throughput. Psycholinguistic research is obsessed with syntactic ambiguities (and there are good reasons for that) but in real life these ambiguities are pretty much always resolved by other sources of information: context, prosody, world-knowledge, social cues. If you disambiguate a language on the syntaxtic level you're basically just…

Post by panglott » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 3:54 AM UTC

Jach wrote: post #61

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 took 5 years of French, 3 years of Latin. I enjoyed them up until the last ~75% or so of my senior year when I was really sick of the whole high school business. I don't think the Latin had outside utility of any sort until the 2nd or 3rd year simply because I didn't have the vocabulary (and I, like the vast majority of people, was unaware of spaced repetition and hated non-spaced repetition flashcards). The study…

Post by schoen » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 4:21 AM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #39

Red_Tarsius wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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 u…

And current languages too. A while back I found this diagram http://imgur.com/ZNlwDUZ , to me it shows how logical greeks were. Terms are symmetrical, well organized, forming a tiny core of combinators.

Post by freehunter » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 12:37 PM UTC

iakdnf wrote: post #73

freehunter wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem I run into as someone who speaks English natively and German as a second language is, outside of the Internet and reading books, I never have a chance to speak German. Even in the actual country of Germany, I speak German just bad enough that I can tell it's painful for people to listen to me struggle, and they'll quickly switch to English if they know it (which they do). The only benefit is I know w…

You are using English because you are using English. When I lived in Germany I used German nearly 100% of the time, and now I speak fluent German with hardly a hitch. 10 years later I regularly run into German speakers, and while it feels a little rusty now, I continue using German because I know if I fall back on English Im going to be using English and not learning German. I recommend you adopt the same learning st…