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This is very true, and I think it's one of the reasons that Esperanto works so well as one's first second language. (I recall seeing one study where a group of
by splat 16y ago
This is very true, and I think it's one of the reasons that Esperanto works so well as one's first second language. (I recall seeing one study where a group of students who learned Esperanto for one year and then French for three years ended up knowing French better than a group of students who studied French exclusively for four years straight. Not conclusive by any means, but suggestive.)
By eliminating the complicated grammatical idiosyncrasies of natural languages, someone learning Esperanto can focus on learning how to learn a foreign language. If you've never learned a second language before, it's easy to memorize vocabulary and obscure grammatical rules, but it's extremely hard to make the transition from reading prose word-by-word to reading it fluently.
- tokenadult 16y agoit's one of the reasons that Esperanto works so well as one's first second language. The parent comment to your comment expressed the idea that ANY previous language aids learning the next language. This has been my experience, after learning elements of about a dozen languages, with proficiency in Chinese such that I can support myself through interpreting Chinese into English or the other way round, or translating from Chinese into English. For scientifically based information on Esperanto, see http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
- randallsquared 16y agoThe parent comment to your comment expressed the idea that ANY previous language aids learning the next language. I think an unstated assumption was that Esperanto is much easier to learn than "natural" languages.
- tokenadult 16y agoI believe you are correct about that being the unstated assumption, in regard to one of the comments above. My experience as a learner of multiple languages from several different language families is that Esperanto is not particularly easy, so I think the assumption is false.
- hugh3 16y agoDoes anyone in the world have Esperanto as their first language?
- tokenadult 16y agoThere are a few children of dedicated Esperantists who have been brought up with Esperanto as one of their native languages. They don't have a lot of people to talk to, alas, whom they can't already speak to with whatever other languages they know.
- riffraff 16y agoapparently, george soros is a native esperantista :)