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> Your time spent learning Esperanto may have actually created a solid foundation to learning Mandarin, if that's what you desire to learn! As a native Mandari

by bctnry 7y ago

> Your time spent learning Esperanto may have actually created a solid foundation to learning Mandarin, if that's what you desire to learn! As a native Mandarin speaker who also knows Esperanto I can tell you this is almost 100% (if not exactly 100%) not the case. If learning Esperanto gives you motivation to learn more, maybe; but the two languages are way too different that it wouldn't help much.

Nadya 7y ago
Your case is not only different from the one I'm claiming it helps (you already spoke Mandarin natively) but also I'm specifically claiming it helps monolinguals who are learning their first non-native language. So unless you went Mandarin --> Esperanto --> English and found Esperanto didn't help you learn English at all then I what I said doesn't apply to you. If you were either bilingual before learning Esperanto I don't think it'd have been very useful as a "diving board" to learning another language as you've already have the knowledge of speaking two languages. And I don't wish to make any assumptions, but if you've been bilingual your entire life I don't think you can even accurately imagine what it is like to be monolingual. Bilinguals have an easier time learning a third language than monolinguals have learning a second [0] [1] [2]. I personally give credit to 3 months of learning Esperanto for helping me get over a huge hurdle in my Japanese studies (after 2 years of studying). Not because Esperanto and Japanese have anything in common - but because learning certain grammatical structures in Esperanto helped the Japanese equivalents finally "click" after I had been struggling with learning them for so long. This doesn't seem to be an uncommon occurrence within the Esperanto community (for those with non-Esperanto target languages). The plural of anecdotes is of course not "data" but the studies (however criticized) and experiences of countless people (including myself) all point to it helping. I hear plenty of stories from people who've never bothered to learn it saying they won't learn it because they'd rather learn their target language instead. It's difficult to even find a story from someone who's learned it and claims it didn't help them at all in learning a non-Esperanto target language. I've tried Googling around a bit - I can only ever find people who shit on conlangs as a concept and refuse to learn one. The longest and hardest thing when learning a language is learning how to learn a language and that's what I personally believe Esperanto (or any conlang really) helps with. I would only ever personally recommend a brief stint (no more than a month or two) of Esperanto for monolinguals. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3583091/#b22-cer-13-12 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3583091/#b22-ce... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19648456 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19648456 [2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110201110915.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110201110915.h...
- KhoomeiK 7y ago
  Some of what you're saying (knowing one language in general helps you learn to learn other languages) is true, but Japanese and Chinese are so grammatically different that the way structures in Esperanto map to Japanese just doesn't hold the same for Chinese. Mandarin is a highly analytical language (words don't inflect or conjugate depending on grammatical function or context: "He has one dog" "They has two dog") while Japanese is synthetic ("He has one dog "They have two dogs), meaning the latter is far closer to most European languages grammatically than either is to Chinese.
  - munmaek 7y ago
    That's not what they're talking about at all. They're talking about learning how to learn a language. Learning a second language gives you meta insight into language learning, which makes it far easier to move onto a third language. For example, I studied German in college. I never really progressed in it that much, but learning how to learn made learning Korean significantly easier for me. It happens that esperanto can be useful for this as it doesn't have all the small idiosyncrasies and exceptions that real languages have.
    - KhoomeiK 7y ago
      >That's not what they're talking about at all. They're talking about learning how to learn a language. Huh? I acknowledged that at the start of my comment: >Some of what you're saying (knowing one language in general helps you learn to learn other languages) is true
  - firethief 7y ago
    Japanese actually is just like Mandarin in your example. Neither verbs nor typical nouns are inflected for number.
    - KhoomeiK 7y ago
      That's true. But there's an expansive politeness and tense inflection system as well as topic and object markers.

by bctnry 7y ago

Nadya 7y ago

Your case is not only different from the one I'm claiming it helps (you already spoke Mandarin natively) but also I'm specifically claiming it helps monolinguals who are learning their first non-native language. So unless you went Mandarin --> Esperanto --> English and found Esperanto didn't help you learn English at all then I what I said doesn't apply to you. If you were either bilingual before learning Esperanto I don't think it'd have been very useful as a "diving board" to learning another language as you've already have the knowledge of speaking two languages. And I don't wish to make any assumptions, but if you've been bilingual your entire life I don't think you can even accurately imagine what it is like to be monolingual. Bilinguals have an easier time learning a third language than monolinguals have learning a second [0] [1] [2]. I personally give credit to 3 months of learning Esperanto for helping me get over a huge hurdle in my Japanese studies (after 2 years of studying). Not because Esperanto and Japanese have anything in common - but because learning certain grammatical structures in Esperanto helped the Japanese equivalents finally "click" after I had been struggling with learning them for so long. This doesn't seem to be an uncommon occurrence within the Esperanto community (for those with non-Esperanto target languages). The plural of anecdotes is of course not "data" but the studies (however criticized) and experiences of countless people (including myself) all point to it helping. I hear plenty of stories from people who've never bothered to learn it saying they won't learn it because they'd rather learn their target language instead. It's difficult to even find a story from someone who's learned it and claims it didn't help them at all in learning a non-Esperanto target language. I've tried Googling around a bit - I can only ever find people who shit on conlangs as a concept and refuse to learn one. The longest and hardest thing when learning a language is learning how to learn a language and that's what I personally believe Esperanto (or any conlang really) helps with. I would only ever personally recommend a brief stint (no more than a month or two) of Esperanto for monolinguals. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3583091/#b22-cer-13-12 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3583091/#b22-ce... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19648456 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19648456 [2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110201110915.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110201110915.h...

KhoomeiK 7y ago
Some of what you're saying (knowing one language in general helps you learn to learn other languages) is true, but Japanese and Chinese are so grammatically different that the way structures in Esperanto map to Japanese just doesn't hold the same for Chinese. Mandarin is a highly analytical language (words don't inflect or conjugate depending on grammatical function or context: "He has one dog" "They has two dog") while Japanese is synthetic ("He has one dog "They have two dogs), meaning the latter is far closer to most European languages grammatically than either is to Chinese.
- munmaek 7y ago
  That's not what they're talking about at all. They're talking about learning how to learn a language. Learning a second language gives you meta insight into language learning, which makes it far easier to move onto a third language. For example, I studied German in college. I never really progressed in it that much, but learning how to learn made learning Korean significantly easier for me. It happens that esperanto can be useful for this as it doesn't have all the small idiosyncrasies and exceptions that real languages have.
  - KhoomeiK 7y ago
    >That's not what they're talking about at all. They're talking about learning how to learn a language. Huh? I acknowledged that at the start of my comment: >Some of what you're saying (knowing one language in general helps you learn to learn other languages) is true
- firethief 7y ago
  Japanese actually is just like Mandarin in your example. Neither verbs nor typical nouns are inflected for number.
  - KhoomeiK 7y ago
    That's true. But there's an expansive politeness and tense inflection system as well as topic and object markers.