7 ms·

Don’t regret anything about taking this path. Six months of Mandarin is barely enough to learn the consonant and tone system right, starting getting the writing

Don’t regret anything about taking this path. Six months of Mandarin is barely enough to learn the consonant and tone system right, starting getting the writing system and learning few patterns and vocabulary. In any case, you wouldn’t have held conversations in it like you did with Esperanto.

nilkn 7y ago
They probably could've learned Spanish to a degree of conversational fluency in the same time period, though. Esperanto has about 1,000 native speakers. Spanish has about 480 million. You can visit entire beautiful countries with fascinating histories where everyone speaks Spanish or its variants. Beyond that, once you can understand spoken Spanish, you can likely understand a bit of Portuguese as well, and you'll be able to learn French and Italian probably at least twice as fast coming from Spanish vs. coming from English.
- sudosteph 7y ago
  That's actually a matter of debate. I studied spanish throughout my high school years, and while I was decent enough at speaking and reading/writing, my ability to comprehend spoken spanish in the real-world was still effectively zero because I never learned how to process it at the speed that native speakers used. I had better luck with French in college though, and Esperanto was still the easiest by far. That said, there are some who claim that learning 1 year of Esperanto and 3 years of French leads to better fluency than studying just french for 4 years. This article on wikipedia has some interesting information on those claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant... The latin-roots that you learn from spanish and french are also present in Esperanto for the most part, so the semi-mutual understanding part you mention is actually still a benefit from Esperanto.
  - nilkn 7y ago
    Virtually nobody in the US gains any sort of fluency from high school instruction in any foreign language unless they supplement the class with their own study. We could discuss why, but that remains true either way. If there's anything I've learned from studying the studying of foreign languages, it's that sufficient interest and passion to pursue a language in your free time is by far the most significant indicator of success.
    - tasogare 7y ago
      > If there's anything I've learned from studying the studying of foreign languages, it's that sufficient interest and passion to pursue a language in your free time is by far the most significant indicator of success. Exactly. 10 or 12 years of German instruction have been thrown into my throat, I can't discuss anything in this language. I've becoming good in English at university level only after I start reading programming related stuff. On the other hand, I have degree in Japanese and got non-null Chinese skills without too much efforts (it seems).
  - fiblye 7y ago
    I’ve learned more in 2 months of language self-study than I got from 3 years of public school study. Being in a room with 30 kids who just want to squeak by with a passing grade and really don’t want to learn is no way to learn a language. There’s not enough practice with output and your brain just turns off.
  - telesilla 7y ago
    >I never learned how to process it at the speed that native speakers used Magic words: más espacio, por favor. I also find having radio or TV in the background in the language I want to learn is very helpful in the longterm. A flatmate of mine used to watch the Simpsons in her non-native language every day to pick up the local accent.
    - nickserv 7y ago
      I think you mean: Más despacio, por favor. You said "more space, please".
      - telesilla 7y ago
        Classic non-native typo, thanks for the fix!
- firethief 7y ago
  Esperanto isn't intended to be anyone's native language (it's an "international auxiliary language") so that's a weird way to compare speakership.
  - nilkn 7y ago
    It has as few as 63k speakers, native or otherwise. The language is barely spoken compared to languages of similar difficulty.
    - rickycook 7y ago
      the very point of esperanto is that nothing is of “similar difficulty”, so even comparing to spanish is disingenuous
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - nickserv 7y ago
        There are other languages of similar difficulty (all constructed), but they are spoken even less than Esperanto.
      - yorwba 7y ago
        That's a bit of a strong claim to make, considering that there are thousands of languages with more speakers than Esperanto, most of which you probably never heard of. My guess is that some contact language has similar difficulty, while having more speakers. Pichinglis [1] seems like a good candidate: 70,000 to 100,000 speakers in Equatorial Guinea; formed as a creole from English and various languages of Western Africa, so you should get a high number of cognates similar to Esperanto and a simplified grammar. It might even help you learn other languages of the region faster. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pichinglis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pichinglis
        firethief 7y ago
        Is that still a good choice for someone who doesn't plan to go to equatorial guinea?
- 6thaccount2 7y ago
  Very wrong I'd say. I was able to read more at 3 weeks than I could with 3 years of Spanish. Spanish might be easier than Latin, but verb conjugations and irregularities in the grammar is no joke. Esperanto gives you a detour around all of that.
  - sweeneyrod 7y ago
    I suspect that is at least partly due to Esperanto content using a smaller vocabulary. Irregular Spanish grammar makes writing/speaking perfectly harder, but in my experience it's not a big barrier for reading.
- aaaaaar 7y ago
  You can literally learn most of Esperanto grammar in the time it takes to learn the difference between "soy/estar" and "por/para" in Spanish. Those are just two Spanish concepts that students spend days learning. Look at a table of contents in a Spanish textbook and count the concepts. Now review an Esperanto textbook. It was designed for fast acquisition. Things that you have to learn in any language - like numbers, verb forms, days of the week, time, spelling, etc - are designed to be as simple as possible. Take a book like "501 Spanish verbs" and adapt it to Esperanto. The book will shrink down to one page, since all verbs are regular. That page will further shrink down because there are fewer conjugations. All conjugations that do exist are composable - each conjugation dimension can be applied separately. They are even consistent between parts of speech. How many people, who are making a serious multi-year effrot in learning a foreign language, no how to say "flutter" in that language? It's not unlikely that Esperanto learners will know that word in the month or so (after they learn the word for "fly", and learn how to make diminutives). Through these mechanisms you only need to learn a fraction of vocabulary, since from a root word you can drive many others.
  - benhurmarcel 7y ago
    Can confirm. I've been living for 3 years in Spain, I work in Spanish and live with a Spanish, and I still get ser/estar wrong very often.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
mumblemumble 7y ago
Seconded. I haven't learned Esperanto myself, but plenty of people agree that Esperanto is a great starting place if you're an adult and only speak one western European language. It's a great confidence builder and it's a non-punishing opportunity to try out different study techniques. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Esperanto then Mandarin will get you to conversational Mandarin more reliably, and possibly also more quickly, than just starting with Mandarin would.
dmoy 7y ago
6 months is insufficient to get the tones right unless you have a really good ear imo
- tasogare 7y ago
  It totally depends on your situation. I said 6 months to be large but it can be closer to 3 if you’re a dedicated learner with a lot of time (like the typical univ student). The trick is to practice with a native speaker from day one, and hear recorded syllables a lot. Optionally one can use Praat to check if their f0 follow the tone contour.
- yorwba 7y ago
  You should be able to produce the correct tone contours by practicing for a few minutes with a teacher who can tell you whether you got it right, assuming you can control the pitch of your voice at all. Maintaining the correct tones during continuous speech is harder, but you can approach that goal by starting slowly and carefully pronouncing each syllable, then speeding up successively. Recognition does require a good ear, but after 6 months of daily practice, vocabulary is more likely to be the bottleneck. Regularly doing listening exercises and consuming spoken-language content helps (even if you don't actually understand a lot yet).
briandear 7y ago
Excerpt you have over a billion people with whom you can communicate vs. the 18 people that speak Esperanto. 6 months of Mandarin and you can order food and have a reasonably simply conversation with a Chinese person. 6 months of Esperanto and you can have a detailed conversation with someone that probably already speaks English, statistically speaking. Esperanto isn’t opening up any cultural doors. At least learning Klingon gets you some legit nerd points at Comic Con. Esperanto doesn’t really give you anything.

nilkn 7y ago

They probably could've learned Spanish to a degree of conversational fluency in the same time period, though. Esperanto has about 1,000 native speakers. Spanish has about 480 million. You can visit entire beautiful countries with fascinating histories where everyone speaks Spanish or its variants. Beyond that, once you can understand spoken Spanish, you can likely understand a bit of Portuguese as well, and you'll be able to learn French and Italian probably at least twice as fast coming from Spanish vs. coming from English.

sudosteph 7y ago
That's actually a matter of debate. I studied spanish throughout my high school years, and while I was decent enough at speaking and reading/writing, my ability to comprehend spoken spanish in the real-world was still effectively zero because I never learned how to process it at the speed that native speakers used. I had better luck with French in college though, and Esperanto was still the easiest by far. That said, there are some who claim that learning 1 year of Esperanto and 3 years of French leads to better fluency than studying just french for 4 years. This article on wikipedia has some interesting information on those claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant... The latin-roots that you learn from spanish and french are also present in Esperanto for the most part, so the semi-mutual understanding part you mention is actually still a benefit from Esperanto.
- nilkn 7y ago
  Virtually nobody in the US gains any sort of fluency from high school instruction in any foreign language unless they supplement the class with their own study. We could discuss why, but that remains true either way. If there's anything I've learned from studying the studying of foreign languages, it's that sufficient interest and passion to pursue a language in your free time is by far the most significant indicator of success.
  - tasogare 7y ago
    > If there's anything I've learned from studying the studying of foreign languages, it's that sufficient interest and passion to pursue a language in your free time is by far the most significant indicator of success. Exactly. 10 or 12 years of German instruction have been thrown into my throat, I can't discuss anything in this language. I've becoming good in English at university level only after I start reading programming related stuff. On the other hand, I have degree in Japanese and got non-null Chinese skills without too much efforts (it seems).
- fiblye 7y ago
  I’ve learned more in 2 months of language self-study than I got from 3 years of public school study. Being in a room with 30 kids who just want to squeak by with a passing grade and really don’t want to learn is no way to learn a language. There’s not enough practice with output and your brain just turns off.
- telesilla 7y ago
  >I never learned how to process it at the speed that native speakers used Magic words: más espacio, por favor. I also find having radio or TV in the background in the language I want to learn is very helpful in the longterm. A flatmate of mine used to watch the Simpsons in her non-native language every day to pick up the local accent.
  - nickserv 7y ago
    I think you mean: Más despacio, por favor. You said "more space, please".
    - telesilla 7y ago
      Classic non-native typo, thanks for the fix!
firethief 7y ago
Esperanto isn't intended to be anyone's native language (it's an "international auxiliary language") so that's a weird way to compare speakership.
- nilkn 7y ago
  It has as few as 63k speakers, native or otherwise. The language is barely spoken compared to languages of similar difficulty.
  - rickycook 7y ago
    the very point of esperanto is that nothing is of “similar difficulty”, so even comparing to spanish is disingenuous
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - nickserv 7y ago
      There are other languages of similar difficulty (all constructed), but they are spoken even less than Esperanto.
    - yorwba 7y ago
      That's a bit of a strong claim to make, considering that there are thousands of languages with more speakers than Esperanto, most of which you probably never heard of. My guess is that some contact language has similar difficulty, while having more speakers. Pichinglis [1] seems like a good candidate: 70,000 to 100,000 speakers in Equatorial Guinea; formed as a creole from English and various languages of Western Africa, so you should get a high number of cognates similar to Esperanto and a simplified grammar. It might even help you learn other languages of the region faster. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pichinglis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pichinglis
      - firethief 7y ago
        Is that still a good choice for someone who doesn't plan to go to equatorial guinea?
6thaccount2 7y ago
Very wrong I'd say. I was able to read more at 3 weeks than I could with 3 years of Spanish. Spanish might be easier than Latin, but verb conjugations and irregularities in the grammar is no joke. Esperanto gives you a detour around all of that.
- sweeneyrod 7y ago
  I suspect that is at least partly due to Esperanto content using a smaller vocabulary. Irregular Spanish grammar makes writing/speaking perfectly harder, but in my experience it's not a big barrier for reading.
aaaaaar 7y ago
You can literally learn most of Esperanto grammar in the time it takes to learn the difference between "soy/estar" and "por/para" in Spanish. Those are just two Spanish concepts that students spend days learning. Look at a table of contents in a Spanish textbook and count the concepts. Now review an Esperanto textbook. It was designed for fast acquisition. Things that you have to learn in any language - like numbers, verb forms, days of the week, time, spelling, etc - are designed to be as simple as possible. Take a book like "501 Spanish verbs" and adapt it to Esperanto. The book will shrink down to one page, since all verbs are regular. That page will further shrink down because there are fewer conjugations. All conjugations that do exist are composable - each conjugation dimension can be applied separately. They are even consistent between parts of speech. How many people, who are making a serious multi-year effrot in learning a foreign language, no how to say "flutter" in that language? It's not unlikely that Esperanto learners will know that word in the month or so (after they learn the word for "fly", and learn how to make diminutives). Through these mechanisms you only need to learn a fraction of vocabulary, since from a root word you can drive many others.
- benhurmarcel 7y ago
  Can confirm. I've been living for 3 years in Spain, I work in Spanish and live with a Spanish, and I still get ser/estar wrong very often.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

mumblemumble 7y ago

Seconded. I haven't learned Esperanto myself, but plenty of people agree that Esperanto is a great starting place if you're an adult and only speak one western European language. It's a great confidence builder and it's a non-punishing opportunity to try out different study techniques. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Esperanto then Mandarin will get you to conversational Mandarin more reliably, and possibly also more quickly, than just starting with Mandarin would.

dmoy 7y ago

6 months is insufficient to get the tones right unless you have a really good ear imo

tasogare 7y ago
It totally depends on your situation. I said 6 months to be large but it can be closer to 3 if you’re a dedicated learner with a lot of time (like the typical univ student). The trick is to practice with a native speaker from day one, and hear recorded syllables a lot. Optionally one can use Praat to check if their f0 follow the tone contour.
yorwba 7y ago
You should be able to produce the correct tone contours by practicing for a few minutes with a teacher who can tell you whether you got it right, assuming you can control the pitch of your voice at all. Maintaining the correct tones during continuous speech is harder, but you can approach that goal by starting slowly and carefully pronouncing each syllable, then speeding up successively. Recognition does require a good ear, but after 6 months of daily practice, vocabulary is more likely to be the bottleneck. Regularly doing listening exercises and consuming spoken-language content helps (even if you don't actually understand a lot yet).

briandear 7y ago

Excerpt you have over a billion people with whom you can communicate vs. the 18 people that speak Esperanto. 6 months of Mandarin and you can order food and have a reasonably simply conversation with a Chinese person. 6 months of Esperanto and you can have a detailed conversation with someone that probably already speaks English, statistically speaking. Esperanto isn’t opening up any cultural doors. At least learning Klingon gets you some legit nerd points at Comic Con. Esperanto doesn’t really give you anything.