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It's not particularly surprising since Esperanto borrows a lot of vocabulary from Romance languages. Even citing from the same Wikipedia page: >According to t

• akvadrako 9y ago
  The answers to your questions are in the wikipedia link. > "10x easier than English or German for French speakers" surprises me 145 hours of Esperanto = 1500 in English = 2000 in German > I could also learn Italian pretty easily Can you learn Italian with less than zero effort? No. Yet in a number of studies listed, those who learned Esperanto and another target language (including Japanese) became better at the target than those who learned only the target.
  • simias 9y ago
    Less than zero effort? Probably not. In 150hours? I'd say I'd get a pretty decent level. French and Italian really are very close, the main difficulty is probably adjusting to the phonology of the spoken language coming from French's rather barbaric pronunciation. I can already slowly decipher Italian newspapers without having ever studied the language. And once I get fluent enough I have access to a wealth of resources to keep studying: movies, tv shows, radio, videogames, newspapers, philosophy books, plays, operas... I can go anywhere in Italy and practice with people in all kinds of situations. I can even get a job there where I'll speak Italian all day long. Esperanto is an interesting experiment but I find it really hard to invest the time necessary to learn the language. >Yet in a number of studies listed, those who learned Esperanto and another target language (including Japanese) became better at the target than those who learned only the target. Did they check if people performed worse when taught, say, 150 hours of Spanish before the target language? It's not really a surprise that learning a language can make it easier to learn other languages, if only because it gives you a certain discipline and mental framework. And if it does turn out that learning 150hours of Spanish has the same benefits, wouldn't it make more sense to do that instead even if the level of proficiency reached is lower? The practical uses of (even basic) Spanish dwarf that of Esperanto.
    • yorwba 9y ago
      > Did they check if people performed worse when taught, say, 150 hours of Spanish before the target language? The Australian study [1] that is cited in the Wikipedia article compared pupils that learned Esperanto, Indonesian, German or Japanese, respectively, in primary school and then went on to learn a possibly different language in secondary school. Let me note a few problems with that study up front: - There was apparently an additional class per week by a professional Esperanto teacher (the other Esperanto teachers were learning on the go). - The Japanese teachers in the comparison rated themselves 0.25-0.5 on a number of 5-point scales (Esperanto: 1.6-2.4, German 4.5-5, Indonesian: 2-3). This is essentially a plus for Esperanto (easy to learn for the teachers), but taints the comparison since the Japanese teachers were basically incompetent. - Due to attrition of study subjects, their evaluation after one year of secondary school has only 21 students of Esperanto. (306 students in total) - They do not differentiate by (or even talk about) the languages learned in secondary school. Now to the findings (on a 5-point scale [1,2,3,4,5], rated by the secondary-school teachers, given as percentages in each category): - Motivation to learn the language (presumably the new one): Esperanto [0, 5, 10, 67, 19], others [ 13, 9, 22, 24, 31]. This one is difficult to analyze, since their motivation might change due to liking the new language better (or worse), or due to a general effect on motivation to learn any language (the authors claim the latter). I'll just point out that both the lowest and the highest scores are rarer among Esperanto students. - "attainment level" (no idea what that specifically means): Esperanto [0, 4, 26, 61, 9], others [10, 9, 23, 26, 32]. Again, both the lowest and the highest scores are rarer among Esperanto students. The striking resemblance to the motivation results is interesting. - speaking ability: Esperanto [0, 0, 48, 43, 10], others [12, 8, 46, 27, 6]. This is the only measure where Esperanto seems to be a uniform improvement. In my opinion, this study mostly shows that this specific Esperanto course did not completely kill off the students ability to learn a foreign language, unlike apparently some other courses. The improvement in speaking ability could be caused by the focus on an immersive classroom experience, but it did apparently transfer to other languages, which is a plus. The study definitely doesn't show anything like "those who learned Esperanto and another target language (including Japanese) became better at the target than those who learned only the target." (Since they didn't test any such thing.) In fact, my best guess at explaining the higher rate of perfect motivation/attainment scores for students of other languages is that they continued studying the same language they had already had in primary school. If this were the case, it would pretty clearly show that learning Esperanto before learning Japanese is not going to help someone learn Japanese faster overall. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040215074307/http://www.education.monash.edu.au/projects/esperanto/ http://web.archive.org/web/20040215074307/http://www.educati...
• restalis 9y ago
  "The only thing that's a bit more difficult in English as far as I can tell is the pronunciation." Add in there a greater load of multi-word expressions compared to other languages, and painstaking word order rules (like if there's more than one adjective then those have to follow each other in a specific manner), and many other downplayed hardships.
  • simias 9y ago
    It's true, I almost mentioned multi-word expressions because I recall that it was a sticking point when learning the language. That being said German loves compound words and those can get a while to get used to as well. Phrase structure is also pretty different in German, with a propensity to put the verb at the end of sentences in some forms. Adjective order however is not really a problem IMO, it's irrelevant while consuming the language (unless a text tries to convey some meaning by purposefully miss-ordering the adjectives) and in general getting it wrong while producing English will make you sound foreign but shouldn't hurt comprehension too much. Saying "the red big house" instead of "the big red house" will raise some eyebrows but should remain understandable.