5 ms·

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, it

by 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.

by msla 3y ago

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.