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Again it depends what you're looking for, if you just want to talk to as many speakers as possible and don't care how long it takes, then yes, spend 5 years int

Again it depends what you're looking for, if you just want to talk to as many speakers as possible and don't care how long it takes, then yes, spend 5 years intensely learning Mandarin, everything else is a waste of time. But if you want a fast path to learning a foreign language (which plugs you into a meta language learning community), then Esperanto is very interesting. Research is fairly promising for French, doesn't look like it helps as much with spanish, or at least nobody's done research on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant... Anecdotally it works well for french because you're secretly learning French word roots, and it builds confidence in the process of language learning.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago
Learning Esperanto first may lead to faster proficiency in French, but it may not be good proficiency. This is because learning the words first through Esperanto would ingrain some bad habits in the learner that will be hard to eradicate after he or she moves on to French. What I have in mind is the fact that French distinguishes between the vowels /ɔ/ and /o/, and between /ɛ/ and /e/. When learning new words, foreigners must get this distinction down right, it is key to having a decent accent in French, and in some cases avoiding misunderstandings. Yet when French roots were used in Esperanto, those vowels were leveled as just /o/ and /e/, respectively. That means that the learner does not learn the right French vowels from the start, and is likely to continue using in French the /o/ learned from Esperanto when the vowel is actually /ɔ/ etc. In modern language teaching, it is considered vital to avoid pronunciation mistakes from the very start, because otherwise they become too firmly rooted to get rid of later.
- chillacy 7y ago
  This is a huge hypothetical scenario, I'd caution any experiment with an N=1 but this is an N=0 example. Anecdotally I don't think my French is worse off because I learned Esperanto first, (nor any of the other languages I learned). If anything, learning more languages makes me more aware of the importance of pronunciation as a meta-learning aspect of languages. It's not like those French roots aren't completely mangled by English learners anyways, words like "-ion" in "situation" and "conversation". But you learn just like any other learner.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago

Learning Esperanto first may lead to faster proficiency in French, but it may not be good proficiency. This is because learning the words first through Esperanto would ingrain some bad habits in the learner that will be hard to eradicate after he or she moves on to French. What I have in mind is the fact that French distinguishes between the vowels /ɔ/ and /o/, and between /ɛ/ and /e/. When learning new words, foreigners must get this distinction down right, it is key to having a decent accent in French, and in some cases avoiding misunderstandings. Yet when French roots were used in Esperanto, those vowels were leveled as just /o/ and /e/, respectively. That means that the learner does not learn the right French vowels from the start, and is likely to continue using in French the /o/ learned from Esperanto when the vowel is actually /ɔ/ etc. In modern language teaching, it is considered vital to avoid pronunciation mistakes from the very start, because otherwise they become too firmly rooted to get rid of later.

chillacy 7y ago
This is a huge hypothetical scenario, I'd caution any experiment with an N=1 but this is an N=0 example. Anecdotally I don't think my French is worse off because I learned Esperanto first, (nor any of the other languages I learned). If anything, learning more languages makes me more aware of the importance of pronunciation as a meta-learning aspect of languages. It's not like those French roots aren't completely mangled by English learners anyways, words like "-ion" in "situation" and "conversation". But you learn just like any other learner.