36 ms·

Esperanto, Toki Pona, Swahili, Indonesian

67 points by surprisetalk 3y ago

msla 3y ago
Sadly, Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke. http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#01 http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#01 > Zamenhof included in Esperanto every Polish phoneme with a consistently used letter or digraph of its own, leaving out only the ones that are harder to recognise as phonemes: the nasal vowels, “soft” (palatalised) consonants, and /dz/.
- myth2018 3y ago
  I like to think that Esperanto is easier, not necessarily easy. It definitely helps if you know e.g. a romance language, but it still is way more accessible than any other "regular" language (and, even for a romance language speaker, it requires effort to learn properly). In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.
  - msla 3y ago
    You can look at the whole rest of the page I linked to for ways in which Esperanto is irregular and parochial. For example: http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/v.html http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/v.html There's a whole word class (words ending in AŬ) which is essentially a "Wastebasket Taxon" for his vocabulary: There is no regularity to what ended up there, merely arbitrary choice. That's acceptable in a natural language, but Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular As Oat Bran, right? > In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages. Really? Do you have any evidence for this? I follow a blog which frequently discusses such things (language use in China) and it's never been mentioned: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
    - myth2018 3y ago
      > Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular I don't know. There are irregularities indeed, but they are so few that it's easy to simply memorize them. > Really? Do you have any evidence for this? Unfortunately I have no URL to share here. This has been discussed a few times in some of the meetings I attended in the local Esperanto club -- and it makes sense, given the language's propedeutic properties. The geopolitical context has probably played a role (even here, in Brazil, part of our youth refused to learn English for some decades after the US sponsored a coup and a dictatorship in the country, and Esperanto was presented as an alternative pursued by a few of us). Also, the Chinese government supports Esperanto. There's esperanto.cri.cn and maybe others, although I'm not informed about the nature of the contracts involved.
    - yorwba 3y ago
      I think it's technically true that someone in China at one point used Esperanto to introduce Western languages to a few other people, because around 1900 it was part of a package of futuristic Western ideas like overthrowing the Emperor and Communism. But the claim omits how utterly unsuccessful Chinese Esperantists were at their goal compared to the revolutionary Communists. (Even though they were sometimes the same people, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Yuzhi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Yuzhi ) For comparison, a few years after Zamenhof started Esperanto, Paul von Möllendorf (a German aristocrat working as a customs official in Shanghai) suggested in his Manchu grammar https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Manchu_Grammar https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Manchu_Grammar that Westerners should study Manchu as an easier introduction to the Chinese classics, the Chinese Emperor at the time being ethnically Manchu. Then the Emperor got deposed and by now the last native Manchu speakers have probably all died of old age. Learning Manchu in order to learn Chinese would be a collosal waste of time. Chinese Esperantists that I know don't really seem to make fewer or different mistakes when using Esperanto than when using English. The marking of tenses with -is, -as, -os may be perfectly regular, but that doesn't help much when grammatical tense itself is a foreign concept to you. Someone who usually uses present tense in English when talking about the past will tend to also use present tense in Esperanto when talking about the past.
      - myth2018 3y ago
        On the other hand, Esperanto is one of the languages featured by Radio China International (https://esperanto.cri.cn https://esperanto.cri.cn), and there's also an official support for the El Cxinia Popolo magazine, and maybe others I'm not aware of. I'm not sure one can generalize 1) the antagonism between the communist government and Esperanto and 2) the lack of skills of the Chinese Esperanto speakers.
        yorwba 3y ago
        There is no antagonism between the government and Esperanto that I'm aware of, more like disinterest. As I mentioned, there was originally a lot of overlap between people supporting either cause, but Esperanto simply never got as popular as Communism. As for China Radio International, the inclusion of Esperanto among the forty-odd languages they translate content into is transparently intended to propagandize to foreign Esperantists more so than promoting the language.
- severak_cz 3y ago
  I have learned Esperanto using Duolingo and I made more mistakes in English (which was the language in which that Esperanto course was tought) than in Esperanto. Mainly because Esperanto is very regular without all those edge cases which English has. BTW English is my second language, Czech is my first and I have some limited knowledge of German.
  - TbobbyZ 3y ago
    I created a x.com account to help me learn Czech. Follow me @horymirzika
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  I think you might exaggerate this a bit. One of the beauties of Esperanto being constructed is that the letters only make one sound and not like 2-4 and there are a bunch of other tricks to keep vocabulary reasonable and grammar logical without a bazillion edge cases. It might be easier for an English speaker to learn than a Chinese speaker, but I guarantee it would be much easier for that Chinese speaker to learn Esperanto than English. Teaching my kid to speak and then how to read and write has been a recent reminder of just how illogical English is. I would have massively struggled as a non-native speaker.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    > One of the beauties of Esperanto being constructed is that the letters only make one sound and not like 2-4 That's true of almost every language though, just not English.
    - School-Cotton 3y ago
      > That's true of almost every language though This is an exaggeration. It’s definitely not true of French, Spanish, or German. Honorable mention for languages like Chinese that don’t even have the concept of “letter”.
      - anthk 3y ago
        Don't even think putting Spanish in the same basket of French of German... French has nothing to do with the almost WYSYWYG spelling of the first...
        kragen 3y ago
        spanish orthography is regular and simple, though it preserves many sound distinctions that have been lost in the spoken language, so text to speech is easy, but speech to text sometimes is not french orthography is regular, except for a few exceptions like 'fils', but not that simple english orthography is neither; it's halfway to chinese
- gxonatano 3y ago
  > Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke. That's a very common misconception about Esperanto. It's true that most of Esperanto's etymology is of European origin, but cognate vocabulary isn't all, or even most, of what makes a language easy to learn. Just to pick one example: in most languages, you need to conjugate verbs according to their subject; in a lot of others, you need to decline nouns, too, according to their cases. And then there are the exceptions: there are hundreds of irregular verbs in English, and thousands in some other languages. Esperanto has none of these difficulties. Even if we were just to consider vocabulary, Esperanto vocabulary is so much easier to learn, because it's agglutinative: it's made up of composable, modular parts that can be recombined into other words. That means, if you know fifty words, you actually know five hundred. Just talk to Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Esperantists, and they'll tell you that Esperanto was a hundred times easier to learn than English, other European languages, and other Asian languages, too.
herculity275 3y ago
> He said that if he could have chosen a language, instead of English, to be the world’s shared second language, then it would be Swahili or colloquial Indonesian. He said both of these languages have been learned by millions of people as their second language, so all the weird edge-cases have worn away, and they are as smooth and beautiful as a river stone. No weird grammar. No weird tones. No exceptions. I have no knowledge of Swahili and perhaps it really is all that but this statement makes no sense - English, French, Russian, Arabic and plenty of other languages have been learned by millions of people as their second language yet they still have plenty of weird grammar, exceptions, and edge-cases.
- anthk 3y ago
  This. Spanish it's almost dumb simple, widely spoken; and Iberian Spanish has few exceptions (the c/z/s spelling split avoid spawning a nazi grammar every two paragraphs as it happens in South American Spanish), and yet, he chose... Indonesian. At Iberia, Spanish was almost the lingua franca between the Occitan branch speakers, the Galician-Portuguese speakers and the Leonese/Asturian ones in the Middle Ages and beyond. It had five vowels compared to the seven ones from the Catalan/Valencian or the 7-8 (if not more) of the Galician-Portuguese. And it got loanwords from all the Iberian romances overtime (and a bit later French and Italian).
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    Spanish has inflectional grammar, which is the one language feature most constructed languages do away with first (with weird exceptions like Volapük that are mostly known for their obscurity) because it's so hard to learn for newcomers.
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      What does it means? EDIT: how you mean how papá (daddy) is different from papa (the pope)? Yes as a french that is my main difficulty with spanish.
      - 3y ago
zozbot234 3y ago
> And oh my god! It’s fascinating! The language [Esperanto] is so well designed! Everything made sense and with each new thing I learned, I thought “That’s brilliant!” Not sure if serious? Obligatory link to JBR's "Bad Language" Ranto: http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/
- senkora 3y ago
  ^This seems to have been downvoted for tone. Fair enough, but I do encourage anyone with an interest in Esperanto to read the linked document. It is a classic post on the complexities of Esperanto that are not obvious to the casual learner, that contains quite a lot of insight.
  - Viliam1234 3y ago
    The entire list is just one huge Nirvana fallacy. Okay, so Esperanto is not literally perfect, it has some flaws... and therefore we should reject it, and instead use some language that has 10x or 100x more of exactly the same flaws? How does that make sense? Some of the objections, I am not even sure what the author tried to say. For example, point 01a, Esperanto has only 5 vowels, while English has 19. Uhm, interesting, but... are you saying that more is better? I guess that would be a subjective choice: more vowels allow words to be shorter, but are difficult to learn for people who do not have such vowels in their native language. So it is not obvious whether 5 or 19 is better; probably depends on whom you ask. Point 01b, Esperantists from different countries pronounce the sound R slightly differently. Well yes, that is what you inevitably get when people from different countries try talking the same language. Do you think their versions of English are the same? Point 02d, Esperanto has accented letters that do not exist on English typewriters. Sure, Esperanto and hundred other languages. What's your point? Is a language universal only when it uses English alphabet? Also, this is not a problem in practice, you either install a keyboard for the language (just like you do with every language other than English) or simply use the "x-method" (write accented letters as letters followed by "x"). But most objections are simply of the kind "I would do it differently". Cool, go ahead and design your own language. Then wait to see it reviewed by someone like you.
claytonwramsey 3y ago
This tracks roughly with my experience learning Esperanto. It's a very cool language with many interesting quirks, but there just aren't a lot of people who speak it, and nearly all of them speak English anyway. I don't regret learning it, but I would probably have been better served by learning another language.
hoseja 3y ago
>No weird grammar. No weird tones. No exceptions. Doubleplusgood.
iansinnott 3y ago
> But for me, still, the language with the greatest unlocking power is clearly Mandarin Chinese Chinese has really excellent grammar. No conjugation, no tenses, no words that change with gender. (All the rest of it is hard though, at least for an English speaker)
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  tones. or knowing what a character means, but not knowing how to say it. or knowing how to say something, but not knowing the character. Vietnamese was easier in that regard.
nickincardone 3y ago
> He said that if he could have chosen a language, instead of English, to be the world’s shared second language, then it would be Swahili or colloquial Indonesian. I've learned Swahili to a basic conversational level and my experience learning the language mirrors the author's time picking up Esperanto. Grammatically, everything seems to make sense especially the simplicity of the verbs, and as a native English speaker you can pretty much pronounce/hear all the sounds from the jump. However, once you get deeper into the language you have to worry about the extreme amount of noun classes (think genders). In Swahili there are 8+ depending how you count them. These noun classes change the prefixes on the adjectives and verbs around them which can cause major confusion. I've always thought if they condensed these noun classes to 1 or 2 then Swahili would be the simplest language in the world.
- hipaa_eng 3y ago
  as a swahili speaker I'd say that the beauty of swahili is that it's commonplace to butcher these noun classes unless you're from Tanzania. Kenyans, Congolese, Ugandas do it all the time
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    As a speaker of a gendered language in a neighbourhood of a non-gendered ones: aside a few anecdotes nobody cares.
shimonabi 3y ago
I started learning Mandarin in December with a Taiwanese teacher that teaches at a university in my tiny country. We have classes for an hour and a half every week online. She forces us to read the sentences in simplified characters, not just to know what the pinyin words mean. It's not easy. I never had any interest in learning an invented language, other than those I use for programming.
yuck39 3y ago
Not sure if OP is the author but my love of learning languages was also unlocked through Esperanto when I was a teenager. Its possible that my journey has been a bit longer, I did eventually get around to studying Mandarin Chinese, From 2016 until present day I still study an hour every day. I also was able to live in China for a year which was a great help. Going from Esperanto, a language designed as a second language, to Chinese, one that is absolutely not, is like going from Ruby on Rails development to writing a web server in Assembly. There is so much more practice and rote memorization required to attain any level of fluency. After over 7 years of study I still speak with an accent and have trouble communicating on some topics. But at this point I can read just about anything which was always my primary goal :).
Graziano_M 3y ago
I learned Esperanto years ago, not because I wanted to speak the language, but because I heard that students who learned it had an easier time picking up third languages, to the point that they'd surpass those who had been learning that 3rd language (as their second) the whole time! It seems that that strong of a claim has been since removed from Wikipedia, and I am skeptical about it as well. I wish I had spent the time just learning Italian from the get-go. Also, like Derek, I was turned off by the community. I found them way too socialist-leaning idealists.
- Taikonerd 3y ago
  > It seems that that strong of a claim has been since removed from Wikipedia It's still on Wikipedia, as the "Paderborn method": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method I'm not sure if Paderborn's claim is true. I'd love to see more modern attempts to replicate it.
  - Graziano_M 3y ago
    Yeah, but its mention on the main Esperanto page no longer mentions the details of the study where the Esperanto first group surpassed the 'Always English', and instead critiques the study.
    - Taikonerd 3y ago
      The main Esperanto page? Which one do you mean?
      - Taikonerd 3y ago
        Oh, sorry, you meant the main Wikipedia page.
miteyironpaw 3y ago
There's an old xkcd comic related to this https://xkcd.com/191/ https://xkcd.com/191/
- surprisetalk 3y ago
  > If you learned to speak lojan, your communication would be completely unambiguous and logical. > Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who learn lojban. Funny! So far I've found the Toki Pona community to be extremely friendly Feel free to email me at hello@taylor.town if you're looking for a TP pen pal :)
shrubble 3y ago
Esperanto as "hippie Klingon" is a very neat turn of phrase, even rolls off the tongue perfectly...
- gxonatano 3y ago
  The comparison to Klingon is really short-sighted, though. Even though Klingon and Esperanto are both constructed languages, Klingon is a fictional language, created to mimic a natural language. Esperanto, on the other hand, is a mature, elegant language, designed to be easy and versatile. That's why Esperanto has a rich body of literature written in and about the language, and Klingon doesn't; why Esperanto has official offices at the United Nations; why UNESCO documents are translated into Esperanto; why Shakespeare has been translated into Esperanto.
Taikonerd 3y ago
> His advice is to spend just a few weeks learning and having conversations in Esperanto, so that you can feel the experience of detaching from your mother tongue. Then you’ll be better-prepared to go learn the language you really want to learn. Ah, the Paderborn method: [0]. If you only speak your native tongue, and you want to learn another language, first learn Esperanto, then learn your target language. You'll actually learn the target language faster than if you had studied it straight away! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method
Jun8 3y ago
For some reason the topic of language brings up a lot of folk theories, half truths, and downright errors. This is not a bad thing, I think a lot of people are fascinated by language and want to understand it on a deeper level. There are many excellent books on the topic.if you’re on Audible, I strongly suggest Mc Whorter’s Language Families course: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/language-families-of-the-world https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/language-families-of.... He’s an expert on African languages and his coverage of those are excellent from an introductory pov. “My language-teaching polyglot friend Benny Lewis said that if you’ve never really spoken another language, then the best strategy is to start with the easiest possible language to learn, which is Esperanto” The advice here is very context dependent. Esperanto was based on European languages, so would be easy for a person already speaking one; if not than not. Also, the concept of “easiest possible language” of course is ill-defined and learner dependent. If you’re interested in artificial languages one interesting book is Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language. If I were pressed to pick an easy to learn language I’d say learn a creole language, which are relatively simplified. This is where Sivers was going with the Swahili idea, I think: although Swahili is not a creole language (https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/4lq80i/why_isnt_swahili_considered_a_creole_language/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/4lq80i/why_isn...) contact by different populations tend to simplify complex language features. Same can be said about English, perhaps, it’s grammar and gender system is ssiplified but of course there’s the notorious spelling problem.
jodrellblank 3y ago
English is full of "all the weird edge-cases" because people want it that way. Consider that we could use '-ed' as the past tense for all words: runned, sitted, drinked, eated, standed, twisted, cutted, turned, seeed, heared, beated, beginned, bended, digged, hurted, holded, selled, sended, shaked, singed, spended, standed, stinked, teached, telled, winned. My first reaction is that it sounds like babytalk, because the only place those are used is by children before they learn to speak 'properly'. They are understandable - if we wanted more regular language, we could just switch to speaking more regular English. Nobody could stop us. We don't, conclusion: we don't want that. The irregular cases are partly there because they have been worn into being that way, rather than having that worn away, like r/DesirePaths[1] are the paths people want to take instead of the paths prescribed for them. Worn through frequent use and it being shorter to say eat/ate than eat/eated. We signal adultness, nativeness, in-group membership, social status, educational status by knowing and using the weird edge cases. Poor people say "baarff" instead of "bath", foreign people say "walk dog" instead of "walk the dog", educated people can spell and use Latin and Greek origin words. In a similar way that jelly and ice cream is famously a children's dessert while mouldy cheese on herb crackers is an adult dessert. Pop goes the weasel is a children's tune and Mozart is an educated adult's composer. Spot the Dog is a children's story, War and Peace isn't. A language which has "all the weird edge-cases have worn away, and they are as smooth and beautiful as a river" is also a Sistine Chapel where all the details have worn away and the whole ceiling is a smooth and beautiful brown, or a Mozart where all the distinct instruments have worn away and the whole tune is a smooth and pure sine wave. People would rather visit a landscape or a church than an empty warehouse - the mind likes details, something to grip on. The programming languages where everything is TokiPona, it's all parentheses, it's all CPU instructions, it's all stack primitives, it's all array transforms, are not the popular ones; when everything looks the same you have a hard time telling where you are or expressing things which are different, differently. A centrally planned "people's language" is about as desirable as a centrally planned "people's car"; one generation after everyone speaks Esperanto, everyone would speak their own dialect of Esperanto with extra chrome, alloy wheels, turbo charger, cutdown exhaust, go-faster stripes, custom decals, fat tyres - the original language, the variant that's more flowery and poetic, the one that's more modern and refined, the one that's more minimal and purer, the one which is more casual and slangy and youthful and irreverant and less regular, the one with more regional or historic loan words, the one spoken by the upper classes or the famous people, etc. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/DesirePaths/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DesirePaths/
eggy 3y ago
I am fluent in Spanish having been born and raised in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in the mid-60s through the mid-80s, which had a large Puerto Rican and Dominican population. Being half-Irish and half-Ukrainian, I spent some time at the Irish Arts Center in NYC learning Irish in the 90s. Given there were about 200k speakers of Irish worldwide back then, and now only 68k I believe, it was more of a curiosity for me then. I spent 7 years in SE Asia, and I learned Indonesian (intermediate still), but my Indonesian wife learned English faster than I picked up Indonesian, and I gave in to speaking English. I lived in East Java for a year, and I love Javanese, which Bahasa Indonesian draws much of its influence from among the 500 to 800+ languages spoken over the 17,000 islands of the archipelago. I am currently learning Arabic, after spending 8 months there over the past 24 months. I like the script and some of the language such as the root-based, three-letter mainly, structure. Spanish has been by far the most useful to me still living in New York State, but I am trying again to push my Indonesian for the sake of my children and to better communicate with my in-laws who know Indonesian, but are more at home with Javanese. I have played with learning Koine Greek over Homeric Greek to be able to read Marcus Aurelius or other contemporaries. I wish I could be fluent in at least three more languages other than my native English and Spanish. Harold Bloom's the "Loom of Language" sent me down the rabbit hole when I was in High School. People complain about having to have learned either Latin or Ancient Greek back in the day in High School, but now literacy in math and languages, seems to be tenuous at best. What happened? I grew up poor and with strife in my neighborhood, but the curriculum seemed so much more demanding. I don't know why; it's not my field of study or interest, but I am curious.
- sivers 3y ago
  Wow, Eggy, you have a really interesting background and even more interesting continued pursuit. Consider connecting: https://sive.rs/contact https://sive.rs/contact
hilux 3y ago
> They were disheveled and unkempt. They had signs saying we could have world peace if everyone spoke Esperanto. ... I cringed. As a math major and lifelong chess player ... "cringy" is how I feel about so many math and chess people I meet. It sucks. Intellectuals so often are impractical, and also interpersonally challenging. I wish I had spent my childhood on team sports instead.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  > As a math major and lifelong chess player ... "cringy" is how I feel about so many math and chess people I meet. It sucks. This feels like something many hobbies share. The more obscure, the more likely you are to run into the weirdos and "edge cases" who are, well, poorly socialized, I guess. But you also get to meet the weirdos and edge cases who are tremendously interesting! > I wish I had spent my childhood on team sports instead. I didn't do any team sports growing up, but I'm trying my best to make sure my kid does.
pavel_lishin 3y ago
Huh, for some reason I thought that jan Misali created Toki Pona, based on the extensive videos they made about it: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQwIDV7FBkA8zApw0pnEJrX https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQwIDV7FBkA...
gxonatano 3y ago
> I feel bad saying that I liked the language but not its speakers. I feel like it’s my fault. It is, in fact, his fault. Esperanto has an estimated 2–5 million speakers worldwide, but this guy goes to one conference, meets a handful of them, and decides the whole language and culture is stupid. Imagine you went to a French language meetup, and had a bad time, but then decided that the whole Francophone world was a bunch of nerds, and that French isn't worth learning. It's incredibly narrow-minded. There are countless Esperanto-speaking communities around the world: clubs, online chatrooms, groups of friends, conferences, special interest groups. Check out telegramo.org for an idea of the diversity of interests that Esperantists have. If there isn't a chat room for your personal interest, don't write blog posts in English complaining about it—create one. Even if Esperanto had no speakers at all, and even if they were all old and weird, (which isn't remotely the case, in reality), it'd still be worth learning, for the same reasons that people learn Latin: it's a beautiful language, a great mental exercise, and a rich literary language. There are tens of thousands of books written in Esperanto, many of which haven't been translated to other languages. And even if Esperanto had no books, stop complaining and write one already.

67 points by surprisetalk 3y ago

msla 3y ago

Sadly, Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke. http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#01 http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#01 > Zamenhof included in Esperanto every Polish phoneme with a consistently used letter or digraph of its own, leaving out only the ones that are harder to recognise as phonemes: the nasal vowels, “soft” (palatalised) consonants, and /dz/.

myth2018 3y ago
I like to think that Esperanto is easier, not necessarily easy. It definitely helps if you know e.g. a romance language, but it still is way more accessible than any other "regular" language (and, even for a romance language speaker, it requires effort to learn properly). In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.
- msla 3y ago
  You can look at the whole rest of the page I linked to for ways in which Esperanto is irregular and parochial. For example: http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/v.html http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/v.html There's a whole word class (words ending in AŬ) which is essentially a "Wastebasket Taxon" for his vocabulary: There is no regularity to what ended up there, merely arbitrary choice. That's acceptable in a natural language, but Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular As Oat Bran, right? > In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages. Really? Do you have any evidence for this? I follow a blog which frequently discusses such things (language use in China) and it's never been mentioned: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
  - myth2018 3y ago
    > Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular I don't know. There are irregularities indeed, but they are so few that it's easy to simply memorize them. > Really? Do you have any evidence for this? Unfortunately I have no URL to share here. This has been discussed a few times in some of the meetings I attended in the local Esperanto club -- and it makes sense, given the language's propedeutic properties. The geopolitical context has probably played a role (even here, in Brazil, part of our youth refused to learn English for some decades after the US sponsored a coup and a dictatorship in the country, and Esperanto was presented as an alternative pursued by a few of us). Also, the Chinese government supports Esperanto. There's esperanto.cri.cn and maybe others, although I'm not informed about the nature of the contracts involved.
  - yorwba 3y ago
    I think it's technically true that someone in China at one point used Esperanto to introduce Western languages to a few other people, because around 1900 it was part of a package of futuristic Western ideas like overthrowing the Emperor and Communism. But the claim omits how utterly unsuccessful Chinese Esperantists were at their goal compared to the revolutionary Communists. (Even though they were sometimes the same people, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Yuzhi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Yuzhi ) For comparison, a few years after Zamenhof started Esperanto, Paul von Möllendorf (a German aristocrat working as a customs official in Shanghai) suggested in his Manchu grammar https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Manchu_Grammar https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Manchu_Grammar that Westerners should study Manchu as an easier introduction to the Chinese classics, the Chinese Emperor at the time being ethnically Manchu. Then the Emperor got deposed and by now the last native Manchu speakers have probably all died of old age. Learning Manchu in order to learn Chinese would be a collosal waste of time. Chinese Esperantists that I know don't really seem to make fewer or different mistakes when using Esperanto than when using English. The marking of tenses with -is, -as, -os may be perfectly regular, but that doesn't help much when grammatical tense itself is a foreign concept to you. Someone who usually uses present tense in English when talking about the past will tend to also use present tense in Esperanto when talking about the past.
    - myth2018 3y ago
      On the other hand, Esperanto is one of the languages featured by Radio China International (https://esperanto.cri.cn https://esperanto.cri.cn), and there's also an official support for the El Cxinia Popolo magazine, and maybe others I'm not aware of. I'm not sure one can generalize 1) the antagonism between the communist government and Esperanto and 2) the lack of skills of the Chinese Esperanto speakers.
      - yorwba 3y ago
        There is no antagonism between the government and Esperanto that I'm aware of, more like disinterest. As I mentioned, there was originally a lot of overlap between people supporting either cause, but Esperanto simply never got as popular as Communism. As for China Radio International, the inclusion of Esperanto among the forty-odd languages they translate content into is transparently intended to propagandize to foreign Esperantists more so than promoting the language.
severak_cz 3y ago
I have learned Esperanto using Duolingo and I made more mistakes in English (which was the language in which that Esperanto course was tought) than in Esperanto. Mainly because Esperanto is very regular without all those edge cases which English has. BTW English is my second language, Czech is my first and I have some limited knowledge of German.
- TbobbyZ 3y ago
  I created a x.com account to help me learn Czech. Follow me @horymirzika
7thaccount 3y ago
I think you might exaggerate this a bit. One of the beauties of Esperanto being constructed is that the letters only make one sound and not like 2-4 and there are a bunch of other tricks to keep vocabulary reasonable and grammar logical without a bazillion edge cases. It might be easier for an English speaker to learn than a Chinese speaker, but I guarantee it would be much easier for that Chinese speaker to learn Esperanto than English. Teaching my kid to speak and then how to read and write has been a recent reminder of just how illogical English is. I would have massively struggled as a non-native speaker.
- adastra22 3y ago
  > One of the beauties of Esperanto being constructed is that the letters only make one sound and not like 2-4 That's true of almost every language though, just not English.
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    > That's true of almost every language though This is an exaggeration. It’s definitely not true of French, Spanish, or German. Honorable mention for languages like Chinese that don’t even have the concept of “letter”.
    - anthk 3y ago
      Don't even think putting Spanish in the same basket of French of German... French has nothing to do with the almost WYSYWYG spelling of the first...
      - kragen 3y ago
        spanish orthography is regular and simple, though it preserves many sound distinctions that have been lost in the spoken language, so text to speech is easy, but speech to text sometimes is not french orthography is regular, except for a few exceptions like 'fils', but not that simple english orthography is neither; it's halfway to chinese
gxonatano 3y ago
> Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke. That's a very common misconception about Esperanto. It's true that most of Esperanto's etymology is of European origin, but cognate vocabulary isn't all, or even most, of what makes a language easy to learn. Just to pick one example: in most languages, you need to conjugate verbs according to their subject; in a lot of others, you need to decline nouns, too, according to their cases. And then there are the exceptions: there are hundreds of irregular verbs in English, and thousands in some other languages. Esperanto has none of these difficulties. Even if we were just to consider vocabulary, Esperanto vocabulary is so much easier to learn, because it's agglutinative: it's made up of composable, modular parts that can be recombined into other words. That means, if you know fifty words, you actually know five hundred. Just talk to Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Esperantists, and they'll tell you that Esperanto was a hundred times easier to learn than English, other European languages, and other Asian languages, too.

herculity275 3y ago

> He said that if he could have chosen a language, instead of English, to be the world’s shared second language, then it would be Swahili or colloquial Indonesian. He said both of these languages have been learned by millions of people as their second language, so all the weird edge-cases have worn away, and they are as smooth and beautiful as a river stone. No weird grammar. No weird tones. No exceptions. I have no knowledge of Swahili and perhaps it really is all that but this statement makes no sense - English, French, Russian, Arabic and plenty of other languages have been learned by millions of people as their second language yet they still have plenty of weird grammar, exceptions, and edge-cases.

anthk 3y ago
This. Spanish it's almost dumb simple, widely spoken; and Iberian Spanish has few exceptions (the c/z/s spelling split avoid spawning a nazi grammar every two paragraphs as it happens in South American Spanish), and yet, he chose... Indonesian. At Iberia, Spanish was almost the lingua franca between the Occitan branch speakers, the Galician-Portuguese speakers and the Leonese/Asturian ones in the Middle Ages and beyond. It had five vowels compared to the seven ones from the Catalan/Valencian or the 7-8 (if not more) of the Galician-Portuguese. And it got loanwords from all the Iberian romances overtime (and a bit later French and Italian).
- zozbot234 3y ago
  Spanish has inflectional grammar, which is the one language feature most constructed languages do away with first (with weird exceptions like Volapük that are mostly known for their obscurity) because it's so hard to learn for newcomers.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    What does it means? EDIT: how you mean how papá (daddy) is different from papa (the pope)? Yes as a french that is my main difficulty with spanish.
    - 3y ago

zozbot234 3y ago

> And oh my god! It’s fascinating! The language [Esperanto] is so well designed! Everything made sense and with each new thing I learned, I thought “That’s brilliant!” Not sure if serious? Obligatory link to JBR's "Bad Language" Ranto: http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/

senkora 3y ago
^This seems to have been downvoted for tone. Fair enough, but I do encourage anyone with an interest in Esperanto to read the linked document. It is a classic post on the complexities of Esperanto that are not obvious to the casual learner, that contains quite a lot of insight.
- Viliam1234 3y ago
  The entire list is just one huge Nirvana fallacy. Okay, so Esperanto is not literally perfect, it has some flaws... and therefore we should reject it, and instead use some language that has 10x or 100x more of exactly the same flaws? How does that make sense? Some of the objections, I am not even sure what the author tried to say. For example, point 01a, Esperanto has only 5 vowels, while English has 19. Uhm, interesting, but... are you saying that more is better? I guess that would be a subjective choice: more vowels allow words to be shorter, but are difficult to learn for people who do not have such vowels in their native language. So it is not obvious whether 5 or 19 is better; probably depends on whom you ask. Point 01b, Esperantists from different countries pronounce the sound R slightly differently. Well yes, that is what you inevitably get when people from different countries try talking the same language. Do you think their versions of English are the same? Point 02d, Esperanto has accented letters that do not exist on English typewriters. Sure, Esperanto and hundred other languages. What's your point? Is a language universal only when it uses English alphabet? Also, this is not a problem in practice, you either install a keyboard for the language (just like you do with every language other than English) or simply use the "x-method" (write accented letters as letters followed by "x"). But most objections are simply of the kind "I would do it differently". Cool, go ahead and design your own language. Then wait to see it reviewed by someone like you.

claytonwramsey 3y ago

This tracks roughly with my experience learning Esperanto. It's a very cool language with many interesting quirks, but there just aren't a lot of people who speak it, and nearly all of them speak English anyway. I don't regret learning it, but I would probably have been better served by learning another language.

hoseja 3y ago

>No weird grammar. No weird tones. No exceptions. Doubleplusgood.

iansinnott 3y ago

> But for me, still, the language with the greatest unlocking power is clearly Mandarin Chinese Chinese has really excellent grammar. No conjugation, no tenses, no words that change with gender. (All the rest of it is hard though, at least for an English speaker)

red-iron-pine 3y ago
tones. or knowing what a character means, but not knowing how to say it. or knowing how to say something, but not knowing the character. Vietnamese was easier in that regard.

nickincardone 3y ago

> He said that if he could have chosen a language, instead of English, to be the world’s shared second language, then it would be Swahili or colloquial Indonesian. I've learned Swahili to a basic conversational level and my experience learning the language mirrors the author's time picking up Esperanto. Grammatically, everything seems to make sense especially the simplicity of the verbs, and as a native English speaker you can pretty much pronounce/hear all the sounds from the jump. However, once you get deeper into the language you have to worry about the extreme amount of noun classes (think genders). In Swahili there are 8+ depending how you count them. These noun classes change the prefixes on the adjectives and verbs around them which can cause major confusion. I've always thought if they condensed these noun classes to 1 or 2 then Swahili would be the simplest language in the world.

hipaa_eng 3y ago
as a swahili speaker I'd say that the beauty of swahili is that it's commonplace to butcher these noun classes unless you're from Tanzania. Kenyans, Congolese, Ugandas do it all the time
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  As a speaker of a gendered language in a neighbourhood of a non-gendered ones: aside a few anecdotes nobody cares.

shimonabi 3y ago

I started learning Mandarin in December with a Taiwanese teacher that teaches at a university in my tiny country. We have classes for an hour and a half every week online. She forces us to read the sentences in simplified characters, not just to know what the pinyin words mean. It's not easy. I never had any interest in learning an invented language, other than those I use for programming.

yuck39 3y ago

Not sure if OP is the author but my love of learning languages was also unlocked through Esperanto when I was a teenager. Its possible that my journey has been a bit longer, I did eventually get around to studying Mandarin Chinese, From 2016 until present day I still study an hour every day. I also was able to live in China for a year which was a great help. Going from Esperanto, a language designed as a second language, to Chinese, one that is absolutely not, is like going from Ruby on Rails development to writing a web server in Assembly. There is so much more practice and rote memorization required to attain any level of fluency. After over 7 years of study I still speak with an accent and have trouble communicating on some topics. But at this point I can read just about anything which was always my primary goal :).

Graziano_M 3y ago

I learned Esperanto years ago, not because I wanted to speak the language, but because I heard that students who learned it had an easier time picking up third languages, to the point that they'd surpass those who had been learning that 3rd language (as their second) the whole time! It seems that that strong of a claim has been since removed from Wikipedia, and I am skeptical about it as well. I wish I had spent the time just learning Italian from the get-go. Also, like Derek, I was turned off by the community. I found them way too socialist-leaning idealists.

Taikonerd 3y ago
> It seems that that strong of a claim has been since removed from Wikipedia It's still on Wikipedia, as the "Paderborn method": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method I'm not sure if Paderborn's claim is true. I'd love to see more modern attempts to replicate it.
- Graziano_M 3y ago
  Yeah, but its mention on the main Esperanto page no longer mentions the details of the study where the Esperanto first group surpassed the 'Always English', and instead critiques the study.
  - Taikonerd 3y ago
    The main Esperanto page? Which one do you mean?
    - Taikonerd 3y ago
      Oh, sorry, you meant the main Wikipedia page.

miteyironpaw 3y ago

There's an old xkcd comic related to this https://xkcd.com/191/ https://xkcd.com/191/

surprisetalk 3y ago
> If you learned to speak lojan, your communication would be completely unambiguous and logical. > Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who learn lojban. Funny! So far I've found the Toki Pona community to be extremely friendly Feel free to email me at hello@taylor.town if you're looking for a TP pen pal :)

shrubble 3y ago

Esperanto as "hippie Klingon" is a very neat turn of phrase, even rolls off the tongue perfectly...

gxonatano 3y ago
The comparison to Klingon is really short-sighted, though. Even though Klingon and Esperanto are both constructed languages, Klingon is a fictional language, created to mimic a natural language. Esperanto, on the other hand, is a mature, elegant language, designed to be easy and versatile. That's why Esperanto has a rich body of literature written in and about the language, and Klingon doesn't; why Esperanto has official offices at the United Nations; why UNESCO documents are translated into Esperanto; why Shakespeare has been translated into Esperanto.

Taikonerd 3y ago

> His advice is to spend just a few weeks learning and having conversations in Esperanto, so that you can feel the experience of detaching from your mother tongue. Then you’ll be better-prepared to go learn the language you really want to learn. Ah, the Paderborn method: [0]. If you only speak your native tongue, and you want to learn another language, first learn Esperanto, then learn your target language. You'll actually learn the target language faster than if you had studied it straight away! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method

Jun8 3y ago

For some reason the topic of language brings up a lot of folk theories, half truths, and downright errors. This is not a bad thing, I think a lot of people are fascinated by language and want to understand it on a deeper level. There are many excellent books on the topic.if you’re on Audible, I strongly suggest Mc Whorter’s Language Families course: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/language-families-of-the-world https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/language-families-of.... He’s an expert on African languages and his coverage of those are excellent from an introductory pov. “My language-teaching polyglot friend Benny Lewis said that if you’ve never really spoken another language, then the best strategy is to start with the easiest possible language to learn, which is Esperanto” The advice here is very context dependent. Esperanto was based on European languages, so would be easy for a person already speaking one; if not than not. Also, the concept of “easiest possible language” of course is ill-defined and learner dependent. If you’re interested in artificial languages one interesting book is Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language. If I were pressed to pick an easy to learn language I’d say learn a creole language, which are relatively simplified. This is where Sivers was going with the Swahili idea, I think: although Swahili is not a creole language (https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/4lq80i/why_isnt_swahili_considered_a_creole_language/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/4lq80i/why_isn...) contact by different populations tend to simplify complex language features. Same can be said about English, perhaps, it’s grammar and gender system is ssiplified but of course there’s the notorious spelling problem.

jodrellblank 3y ago

English is full of "all the weird edge-cases" because people want it that way. Consider that we could use '-ed' as the past tense for all words: runned, sitted, drinked, eated, standed, twisted, cutted, turned, seeed, heared, beated, beginned, bended, digged, hurted, holded, selled, sended, shaked, singed, spended, standed, stinked, teached, telled, winned. My first reaction is that it sounds like babytalk, because the only place those are used is by children before they learn to speak 'properly'. They are understandable - if we wanted more regular language, we could just switch to speaking more regular English. Nobody could stop us. We don't, conclusion: we don't want that. The irregular cases are partly there because they have been worn into being that way, rather than having that worn away, like r/DesirePaths[1] are the paths people want to take instead of the paths prescribed for them. Worn through frequent use and it being shorter to say eat/ate than eat/eated. We signal adultness, nativeness, in-group membership, social status, educational status by knowing and using the weird edge cases. Poor people say "baarff" instead of "bath", foreign people say "walk dog" instead of "walk the dog", educated people can spell and use Latin and Greek origin words. In a similar way that jelly and ice cream is famously a children's dessert while mouldy cheese on herb crackers is an adult dessert. Pop goes the weasel is a children's tune and Mozart is an educated adult's composer. Spot the Dog is a children's story, War and Peace isn't. A language which has "all the weird edge-cases have worn away, and they are as smooth and beautiful as a river" is also a Sistine Chapel where all the details have worn away and the whole ceiling is a smooth and beautiful brown, or a Mozart where all the distinct instruments have worn away and the whole tune is a smooth and pure sine wave. People would rather visit a landscape or a church than an empty warehouse - the mind likes details, something to grip on. The programming languages where everything is TokiPona, it's all parentheses, it's all CPU instructions, it's all stack primitives, it's all array transforms, are not the popular ones; when everything looks the same you have a hard time telling where you are or expressing things which are different, differently. A centrally planned "people's language" is about as desirable as a centrally planned "people's car"; one generation after everyone speaks Esperanto, everyone would speak their own dialect of Esperanto with extra chrome, alloy wheels, turbo charger, cutdown exhaust, go-faster stripes, custom decals, fat tyres - the original language, the variant that's more flowery and poetic, the one that's more modern and refined, the one that's more minimal and purer, the one which is more casual and slangy and youthful and irreverant and less regular, the one with more regional or historic loan words, the one spoken by the upper classes or the famous people, etc. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/DesirePaths/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DesirePaths/

eggy 3y ago

I am fluent in Spanish having been born and raised in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in the mid-60s through the mid-80s, which had a large Puerto Rican and Dominican population. Being half-Irish and half-Ukrainian, I spent some time at the Irish Arts Center in NYC learning Irish in the 90s. Given there were about 200k speakers of Irish worldwide back then, and now only 68k I believe, it was more of a curiosity for me then. I spent 7 years in SE Asia, and I learned Indonesian (intermediate still), but my Indonesian wife learned English faster than I picked up Indonesian, and I gave in to speaking English. I lived in East Java for a year, and I love Javanese, which Bahasa Indonesian draws much of its influence from among the 500 to 800+ languages spoken over the 17,000 islands of the archipelago. I am currently learning Arabic, after spending 8 months there over the past 24 months. I like the script and some of the language such as the root-based, three-letter mainly, structure. Spanish has been by far the most useful to me still living in New York State, but I am trying again to push my Indonesian for the sake of my children and to better communicate with my in-laws who know Indonesian, but are more at home with Javanese. I have played with learning Koine Greek over Homeric Greek to be able to read Marcus Aurelius or other contemporaries. I wish I could be fluent in at least three more languages other than my native English and Spanish. Harold Bloom's the "Loom of Language" sent me down the rabbit hole when I was in High School. People complain about having to have learned either Latin or Ancient Greek back in the day in High School, but now literacy in math and languages, seems to be tenuous at best. What happened? I grew up poor and with strife in my neighborhood, but the curriculum seemed so much more demanding. I don't know why; it's not my field of study or interest, but I am curious.

sivers 3y ago
Wow, Eggy, you have a really interesting background and even more interesting continued pursuit. Consider connecting: https://sive.rs/contact https://sive.rs/contact

hilux 3y ago

> They were disheveled and unkempt. They had signs saying we could have world peace if everyone spoke Esperanto. ... I cringed. As a math major and lifelong chess player ... "cringy" is how I feel about so many math and chess people I meet. It sucks. Intellectuals so often are impractical, and also interpersonally challenging. I wish I had spent my childhood on team sports instead.

pavel_lishin 3y ago
> As a math major and lifelong chess player ... "cringy" is how I feel about so many math and chess people I meet. It sucks. This feels like something many hobbies share. The more obscure, the more likely you are to run into the weirdos and "edge cases" who are, well, poorly socialized, I guess. But you also get to meet the weirdos and edge cases who are tremendously interesting! > I wish I had spent my childhood on team sports instead. I didn't do any team sports growing up, but I'm trying my best to make sure my kid does.

pavel_lishin 3y ago

Huh, for some reason I thought that jan Misali created Toki Pona, based on the extensive videos they made about it: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQwIDV7FBkA8zApw0pnEJrX https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuYLhuXt4HrQwIDV7FBkA...

gxonatano 3y ago

> I feel bad saying that I liked the language but not its speakers. I feel like it’s my fault. It is, in fact, his fault. Esperanto has an estimated 2–5 million speakers worldwide, but this guy goes to one conference, meets a handful of them, and decides the whole language and culture is stupid. Imagine you went to a French language meetup, and had a bad time, but then decided that the whole Francophone world was a bunch of nerds, and that French isn't worth learning. It's incredibly narrow-minded. There are countless Esperanto-speaking communities around the world: clubs, online chatrooms, groups of friends, conferences, special interest groups. Check out telegramo.org for an idea of the diversity of interests that Esperantists have. If there isn't a chat room for your personal interest, don't write blog posts in English complaining about it—create one. Even if Esperanto had no speakers at all, and even if they were all old and weird, (which isn't remotely the case, in reality), it'd still be worth learning, for the same reasons that people learn Latin: it's a beautiful language, a great mental exercise, and a rich literary language. There are tens of thousands of books written in Esperanto, many of which haven't been translated to other languages. And even if Esperanto had no books, stop complaining and write one already.