13 ms·

Esperanto is finding new life online

86 points by shawndumas 11y ago

panglott 11y ago
It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto. If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto. Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pretty awesome, though.
- weinzierl 11y ago
  "You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once." -- Czech proverb Dead languages like Latin and Old Greek don't add lives. You don't even speak them. More seriously: I'm all for offering Latin, Greek, and even Esperanto but why would you give up teaching modern foreign languages? Why do you think they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto?
  - panglott 11y ago
    The key premise is that one year of mandatory classroom teaching isn't actually going to get someone speaking proficiently, unless perhaps it's something like Esperanto. They won't be speaking Latin either, but at least some written knowledge of Latin will be useful. The basic paradigm of classroom language education started when Latin was commonly taught... and since it focused on teaching passive, literary use of the language (rather than active, oral use), that was entirely appropriate. But superficial, passive, literary understanding of modern national languages doesn't help anyone much more than it would of Latin.
    - notahacker 11y ago
      Sure, but the point is that a superficial literary understanding of Spanish is a stepping stone towards plonking yourself in a Spanish-speaking country and realising just how much Spanish you don't know, not to mention a substantial step towards being able to read a vast and growing quantity of Spanish-only written material. A superficial literary understanding of Latin gives you middle class bragging rights and a substantial step towards being able to parse the original text of a literature which has been exhaustively translated into English, complete with notes on shades of meaning. (And an even more limited grasp of some of the fundamentals of Spanish, I suppose) And since the source material is all ancient texts, you can't even pep the teaching up with some relevant and modern material or motivate the students by the prospect they can use it to backpack in Peru or do language exchange in Madrid. I'm not persuaded that the inadequacy of languages teaching is an argument for the same time to be devoted to devoted to something which is even further removed from being useful and the teacher is even less likely to be adequately equipped to teach.
      - panglott 11y ago
        These days we have good models for how to teach bilingualism to kids: dual-language immersion schools, in which both languages are used extensively in coursework. The problem is that this labor-intensive model will be impractical outside metropolitan areas with school choice, or communities with a strong heritage language community. Latin may not be a living language, but it remains very widely used in scientific terminology, law, religion, and elsewhere. Like the prestigious national languages, it is a mark of erudition and social status; the demonstration of which is itself a purpose of education.
  - jerf 11y ago
    I'll be more bold than panglott... we can't "give up" teaching modern foreign languages, because we already don't teach modern foreign languages. I took four years of high school French, and got decent grades. I recently started reviewing and learning more through flashcards in Anki. On the one hand, the fours years of "study" put enough French in my head that I'm making progress this way... on the other hand, as I continue making what is frankly a great deal more progress with the spaced-repitition than I ever made in school I still can't help but notice I still can not fluently read much of anything, let alone speak or hear it. Now, as it is common on the Internet to confuse saying something is true with advocating for that fact, let me say that A: I still think learning a language is a good idea, I just don't think what we have now can actually be called "learning a language" and B: if we were ever allowed to change The Holy Curriculum [1], there's probably more effective ways to teach a foreign language. I can't help but notice that my Anki-based studies are wildly more effective than what I tried to do in school. (They're also still inadequate on their own so far. No contradiction there... my schooling was even more inadequate, you see.) Four years of a properly-researched and developed language program, with proper software support, might have produced someone at least capable of using the language at the end. [1]: A phrase I am settling in on to indicate my contempt for the idea that we need to deeply reform education, but we must do so under the constraint that nobody is ever allowed to remove, add, reorder, or change anything we do, ever.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      Language study is tough in high school. A better case can be made for teaching languages as early as possible (pre-K, K-6). My nephew's Catholic school is teaching him Spanish[1] in pre-K and will continue until 8th grade. I took Dakota (not to be confused with Lakota) in high school. I couldn't really speak it then or now[2], but it did stick with me[3], but I see the children who learned it in K-6 did much better. 1) My parents and I recently took my 5 year old nephew with us on vacation to DC. He tends to sing at that age. We were in an elevator and he started in on a song and a couple from Spain started asking me questions about it. I really could only say he was being taught Spanish at his school. 2) I just cannot do a guttural with my voice. It sounds like I'm coughing. I have such a low voice anyway that it sounds wrong all the way around. At least I learned from a male instructor, that's a bit important as the sexes speak differently in Dakota. My old boss, a female, learned to speak from her uncles and her aunts thought she "spoke like a man". 3) I still do server names in Dakota. wanca is my #1 server.
- striking 11y ago
  As someone who knows the Polish language: I agree with you. With the Esperanto part, at least. Latin's very mentally stimulating, but more useless than a modern language, so I wouldn't quite agree with learning it.
  - panglott 11y ago
    I think we have some strange ideas about how and why studying languages are "useful". Most Americans are monolingual English speakers, and almost by definition can't study a language that's more "useful" than English. There are large cognitive benefits to bi- and multilingualism, but for these it doesn't actually matter what language you speak: a heritage or minority language is as good as anything else. But the classroom model of the United States isn't actually designed to make people multilingual; if anything, it's the opposite. The default language policy of the United States is mostly to shift people to English monolingualism, no matter their circumstances, heritage, or language rights.
- psychometry 11y ago
  The point is that many students continue learning that language past that one year. It's much better to give students practical skills in a living language.
  - panglott 11y ago
    What percentage of American high-school students who take their mandatory year of foreign language continue on to speak that language proficiently and competently? What "practical skills"? The supposed economic value from learning modern national languages is wildly overstated, for English monolinguals. It's better to learn languages because learning languages is valuable for its own sake, and pick the language you learn simply because you like it. There is a huge disconnect between our implicit goals for language learning in this country and the effort we expend upon it. I strongly believe in the value of language education, but given the amount of time and money we're willing to spend on it, we'd get as much or more benefit from making them study Latin. With Latin, all the people who want to learn a Romance language would get a leg up on it, and all the people who want to study biology would get a leg up on that, and people who are fine with just speaking English will get more insight into their own language.
    - psychometry 11y ago
      Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition. What's wildly overstated is the benefit learning Latin has on anything other than taking the SAT. Studying French is much more beneficial to speaking French than studying Latin and I shouldn't have to explain why that is the case.
      - mason240 11y ago
        >Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition. Let's be honest here - nothing of value is lost. The opportunity costs of even one year of any non-English language for American HS students makes it simply not worth it.
- ketralnis 11y ago
  > should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto Why teach Latin, Greek, or Esperanto badly? How does that help? And if you can solve the "badly" problem, why not teach something that can be used day-to-day?
  - panglott 11y ago
    That most Americans do not have occasion to speak a language other than English day to day is exactly the reason most of them will not learn another language. The "badly" problem is actually a really huge one.
- jkot 11y ago
  Why? I have basic french and german and it was usefull many times.
- ajkjk 11y ago
  I'm honestly surprised to learn that anyone defends learning Latin outside of academic scholarship. I guess I feel the same about Greek but no one learns that in the US so it's less argued about. I took Latin in high school and felt that I wasted four years I could have spent learning (rudimentary) Spanish, or at least something that had any cultural relevance at all. You have to find a way to make kids care about it as well as justifying its utility. I see Latin and Greek education as historical relics, akin to how we used to emphasizing testing students' ability to construct shapes with compasses and straightedges, or their ability to memorize bible verses.
  - panglott 11y ago
    On a day to day basis, the average American is simply actually a lot likelier to encounter Latin biological nomenclature or legal or religious terminology than, say, a fluent conversation in German. The United States is largely monolingual in English for a thousand miles, and the language ideology here causes immigrants to want their children to shift to English monolingualism as quickly as possible. And thus bad Latin is more useful than bad German.
    - freehunter 11y ago
      The real problem I run into as someone who speaks English natively and German as a second language is, outside of the Internet and reading books, I never have a chance to speak German. Even in the actual country of Germany, I speak German just bad enough that I can tell it's painful for people to listen to me struggle, and they'll quickly switch to English if they know it (which they do). The only benefit is I know what the weather forecast will be and I know what the announcements at the Bahnhof mean, so I know what train to get on. I've visited Mexico with my Spanish-speaking wife (semi-natively) and while the locals loved to hear her speak their language, we communicated mostly in English if we wanted to be easily understood. The struggle is real for Americans, or for native English speakers as a whole. For Americans, there is no other language spoken for thousands of miles like you mentioned (Mexico and Quebec (to a limited extent)), and even then, most of the people we interact with on vacation will speak English. I put serious effort into maintain my German, and she puts serious effort into maintaining her Spanish. But we rarely have the chance to actually use it, even if we're in a country that speaks the language. English has won.
- bkeroack 11y ago
  Guess what determines school curricula in most cases? The opinions of the parents who care enough to go to school board meetings, serve on the board or complain to officials.
- Jach 11y ago
  I took 5 years of French, 3 years of Latin. I enjoyed them up until the last ~75% or so of my senior year when I was really sick of the whole high school business. I don't think the Latin had outside utility of any sort until the 2nd or 3rd year simply because I didn't have the vocabulary (and I, like the vast majority of people, was unaware of spaced repetition and hated non-spaced repetition flashcards). The study of French and Roman culture and history was more interesting (and also fun when done in the respective languages) but due to the lack of slow history (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/09/slow-history-and-mysterious-20th.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/09/slow-hi...) in modern education I'd say its utility was limited. That utility I got from Latin the language was mainly in deciphering a few words (or contemplating a deeper meaning behind them) instead of reaching for Google's "define:word" -- but my vocabulary has lapsed and I don't care to refresh it. The other form of utility was minor because I had already studied French for two years, and that utility is contemplation of different grammatical forms and how language is structured, which can improve communication skills. I had a great English grammar class in 8th grade, and that was basically it for serious study of English grammar, but learning French allowed me to reflect more on language grammar in general so when Latin came along it was just another thing to reflect on rather than starting the reflection itself, very marginal utility. But these utilities really don't justify the classes and resources on their own... If we want high school to produce the greatest amount of utilons, we should be explicit about that, but then many many things will need to change. I believe English should be the world language, there's no practical reason to teach anything else at the expense of other more practical things to teach (like programming), especially in English speaking countries. If we want high school to more approximate what Universities used to represent, such as encouraging more Intellectualism (which I don't think is all that great, at least society-wide, from a utility perspective...), we should be explicit about that too, and again things will change. You might want to have students study French, Greek, Latin, Lojban, etc. for at least 2 years each because of Intellectualism -- but you may also want to balance that with more modern things like deeper computer science or math or physics, which won't help most people in their future lives either but can at least be fun and intellectually interesting for people who want their Intellectualism a certain way. Or we can try for a mix, but I'd propose that our current system is a mix, and other mixes will inevitably resemble the current system by being one-size-fits-all and not work too well. So if we want both, separate. Bring back trade schools and let young teenagers wholly uninterested in purely intellectual pursuits get to doing more interesting things like building a house or building JavaEE applications, and let the intellectuals do their thing without constantly having to waste time and energy rationalizing some vague utility and relevance to their proof-carrying code research.
- intopieces 11y ago
  Languages are not just languages. They're also a component of a wider culture. Foreign language education exposes students to cultures and ways of thinking not present in their day to day culture and allows them to understand and possibly communicate with people around them who speak that language (living in central Texas, you ought to know a bit of Spanish).
baddox 11y ago
Speaking of constructed languages, you might find Lojban interesting. It is "a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic." I have read most of the official language description. It's a compelling book not just about Lojban, but about logic and English grammar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://mw.lojban.org/papri/the_Complete_Lojban_Language http://mw.lojban.org/papri/the_Complete_Lojban_Language
- tmalsburg2 11y ago
  There is a reason why human languages evolved to have syntactic ambiguity: better throughput. Psycholinguistic research is obsessed with syntactic ambiguities (and there are good reasons for that) but in real life these ambiguities are pretty much always resolved by other sources of information: context, prosody, world-knowledge, social cues. If you disambiguate a language on the syntaxtic level you're basically just adding excessive redundancy. There are special niches where disambiguating information is scarce or where any misinterpretation could have catastophic consequences (e.g., aviation handbooks) but outside these domains the absence of syntactic ambiguity is hardly a desirable property.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    International diplomacy?
    - tmalsburg2 11y ago
      There you can always ask for clarification. I'm not aware of any war that has been started because of a syntactic ambiguity. But when your plane is about to crash or when your nuclear reactor is threatening to melt down, you may not be able to get a clarification.
  - baddox 11y ago
    I don't think that syntactic ambiguity is particularly crucial to throughput. There is still plenty of semantic ambiguity possible in Lojban, and from what I have seen Lojban doesn't seem to have particularly lower throughput than natural languages.
athenot 11y ago
All languages have a culture associated to them. It's hard to dissociate the culture from the language. Even English, which is used in different cultures, has local optimizations when it is used daily. Latin is bound to an ancient culture (and a religious one). Even Klingon and Quenya are bound to the universes and cultures created by their authors & fan bases. But I don't see any culture associated with Esperanto. I'm wondering if things might be different if its proponents started associating with a niche culture (be it business) and then expand out to encompass things from everyday life. I don't know what the answer is…
- panglott 11y ago
  There is a very distinctive culture to Esperanto: people who continue to hope for positive social transformation and international and intercultural harmony. Esperantist and conlanger William Annis (on the Conlangery podcast) said something to the effect that, if you go to a Esperanto congress, you should start with the default assumption that everyone you meet is a gay vegetarian. [1] I cannot speak to the truth of this myself ;) [1] http://conlangery.com/2011/12/05/94/ http://conlangery.com/2011/12/05/94/
  - neverartful 11y ago
    That sounds more like a philosophy than a culture.
    - schoen 11y ago
      There is even an Esperantist movement that explicitly argues that it's a culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raumism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raumism
martinrue 11y ago
For anyone interested in learning a little more about Esperanto, Duolingo just put their Esperanto course into public beta and there's a good amount of learning content already: https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto-Online https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto-Online. There's also http://lernu.net http://lernu.net, probably the most well-known source of Esperanto news, lessons and other stuff. Amuziĝu!
- rmxt 11y ago
  Came here to share the good news about Esperanto on Duolingo, too! Duolingo is fantastic and I am addicted to keeping my streak alive. However, I find the lack of variety and relative rigidity of the sentences to be offputting over time. I've nearly completed two trees, and have been a pretty consistent user over the past 3 years, so sometimes the monotony of the sentences drags me down. I have to imagine that we (collectively) are very close to having a sentence generator that can throw together a pertinent and sensical verb phrase and noun phrase that differs just slightly from the curated/created sentences, at least for the Indo-European languages.
Red_Tarsius 11y ago
I've always thought Esperanto to be an incredibly bad idea. http://xkcd.com/927/?cmpid=pscau http://xkcd.com/927/?cmpid=pscau
- lamby 11y ago
  Not really. Surely the real problem is that learning Esperanto means you can now talk to people who, well, are the kind of people who learnt Esperanto...
  - oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
    http://xkcd.com/191/ http://xkcd.com/191/
    - iamcurious 11y ago
      I'm surprised no one has made a here-is-the-right-xkcd-comic-for-this-situation bot.
- erikb 11y ago
  This is the perfect post for a more in depth argumentation. Otherwise there is not much discussion value here, only disturbance.
- freehunter 11y ago
  Esperanto has some incredibly good aspects to it, though. The biggest, of course, is that learning Esperanto (which is very easy to do) helps tremendously with learning other languages. So it doesn't really matter if you think Esperanto is an incredibly bad idea, Esperanto is an incredibly good idea if you're looking to learn other languages afterwards. It's not just another standard. It's a great learning aid. "A group of European secondary school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a control group, who studied French for all four years." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Third-language_acquisition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Third-language_acquis...
tokenadult 11y ago
From the article: "Four people had been listed as 'attending' on the Facebook page for the event, but by the time the meeting began, eight Esperantists were sitting in a rough semicircle of dormroom couches and hard plastic chairs." Ladies and gentlemen, that is in New York City, where a social club meeting on almost any topic might be expected to attract more attendance. Esperanto has severe growth problems if that is how interesting it is to prospective learners. I have used some Esperanto textbooks to learn a bit of Esperanto, and I have read whole books about the artificial language movement and the development of Esperanto over time. If we take Esperanto to be a hobby, like stamp collecting, then I say "More power to you" if you are interested in Esperanto. But if we take Esperanto as a serious proposal to produce a practical "interlanguage" for worldwide communication, then we have to count Esperanto as a failure. Esperanto has had fewer speakers (to a given level of proficiency) and fewer readers (likewise) in all time than either English or Chinese gains in one year simply by natural increase and extension of education to the masses. As I studied Esperanto, along with studying human languages such as Chinese (four modern Sinitic languages and also ancient Literary Chinese), Russian, German, Japanese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic Greek and Koine Greek, and assorted other languages, I was struck by how many design bugs Esperanto has. Many of the decisions made by Ludwik Zamenhof as he designed Esperanto reflected exactly the languages he knew in childhood in Russian-occupied Poland, but didn't reflect at all what makes a language easy to learn or to use as a second language with speakers of varied backgrounds. I used to think that I would have to do a write-up about the flaws of Esperanto myself, but then in the 1990s I discovered an online description of Esperanto by a sophisticated student of constructed languages,[1] and I see by checking the link again that that description has been continually updated over the last two decades. The statement in the article kindly submitted here that "Esperanto is an artificial language, designed to have perfectly regular grammar, with none of the messy exceptions of natural tongues" is demonstrably false, and the link I have shared here will show the statement to be false. What ultimately turned me off to Esperanto as a movement and even as a hobby was seeing frankly incredible statements about Esperanto and about other human languages made by Esperanto-hobbyists who thought they were proposing a practical tool for world communication. If Esperanto is your hobby, more power to you. But if you propose Esperanto as a world interlanguage, you had best acknowledge the reality that Esperanto has always failed in that role, and always will. [1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
splat 11y ago
It's not often mentioned as a reason to learn Esperanto, but the literature of Esperanto is really quite wonderful and makes learning the language well worth it. I've only read a handful of books in Esperanto so far, but it has been an excellent way to read first-hand accounts of people writing about their own cultures and experiences. Last night I finished reading Vikitmoj (Victims) by Julio Baghy. The book is a semi-autobiographical story of the author's experiences in a Siberian prisoner of war camp after WWI. It's a fascinating glimpse into life in these camps and how the different populations (POWs, soldiers, peasants, Jews, bolsheviks, etc.) all interacted with each other. As an example, one practice Baghy writes of is a kind of "duel" that the POWs would sometimes engage in between each other. (In the book it came out that one of the POWs had been sleeping with the wife of another of the POWs back before they had been captured.) They weren't allowed weapons, so they had to be a little creative. They would draw lots and the loser would have to provoke the soldiers on one of their marches so that the soldiers would beat him (sometimes to death). If you learn any national language, you'll be able to read people in a handful of cultures write about themselves in their own words. But one of the unique features of Esperanto is that after you learn it, you can read the works of people in cultures all across the globe without the need of a translator as intermediary. (Of course the subset of people in a culture who write in Esperanto is not representative of the general population, but it's better than nothing!) In particular, many of these works haven't been translated into English (or any other language for that matter), so you would have no way to read them otherwise anyway!
- colindean 11y ago
  Ĉu vi legis libron "Marvirinstrato"? Mi posedas ĝin ekde liberigo, sed mia Esperanto ŝajnas esti tro baza eternale :-( http://www.amazon.com/Marvirinstrato-Originalaj-noveloj-Esperanto-Edition/dp/1439236348 http://www.amazon.com/Marvirinstrato-Originalaj-noveloj-Espe...
  - splat 11y ago
    Ne, bedaŭrinde mi ne tre familiaras kun la esperantliteraturo. Ĝi ŝajnas interese, tamen! Se vi volas pli facile legeblaj libroj, mi rekomendas Faktoj kaj Fantazioj de Marjorie Boulton. Ĝi ne estas tro malfacila, sed tre amuziga!
coolguy43 11y ago
That is good for esperanto. I study chinese online at http://preply.com/en/chinese-by-skype http://preply.com/en/chinese-by-skype and I really think learning a new language like esperanto has a lot of benefits.
coolguy43 11y ago
Speaking of other languages like esperanto, I teach speaking english like a native at http://preply.com/en/skype/english-native-speakers http://preply.com/en/skype/english-native-speakers
7erb 11y ago
I'm working on a conlang called 7erb (pronounced Verb). It's a language of only seven (7) words in its entire vocabulary. Here's what I got so far: - All seven words in the vocabulary are a negative. A word means "everything but that word. Words are then "stacked" to be more "anti-specific" - 7erb is completely present-tense. Past and future are not acknowledged - Anything in this world that can be evaluated in various ways depending upon arbitrary conditions are generally avoided in 7erb. 7erb is a language of reality, not subjectivity and opinion. There are no words in 7erb that function as adjectives - However, vocal pitch and tonality can indicate degrees of closeness, height, intensity etc. In written form, this can be expressed with bold text, underscoring etc If anyone is interested in developing this new language, please contact me (see my profile).

86 points by shawndumas 11y ago

It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto. If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto. Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pretty awesome, though.

weinzierl 11y ago
"You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once." -- Czech proverb Dead languages like Latin and Old Greek don't add lives. You don't even speak them. More seriously: I'm all for offering Latin, Greek, and even Esperanto but why would you give up teaching modern foreign languages? Why do you think they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto?
- panglott 11y ago
  The key premise is that one year of mandatory classroom teaching isn't actually going to get someone speaking proficiently, unless perhaps it's something like Esperanto. They won't be speaking Latin either, but at least some written knowledge of Latin will be useful. The basic paradigm of classroom language education started when Latin was commonly taught... and since it focused on teaching passive, literary use of the language (rather than active, oral use), that was entirely appropriate. But superficial, passive, literary understanding of modern national languages doesn't help anyone much more than it would of Latin.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    Sure, but the point is that a superficial literary understanding of Spanish is a stepping stone towards plonking yourself in a Spanish-speaking country and realising just how much Spanish you don't know, not to mention a substantial step towards being able to read a vast and growing quantity of Spanish-only written material. A superficial literary understanding of Latin gives you middle class bragging rights and a substantial step towards being able to parse the original text of a literature which has been exhaustively translated into English, complete with notes on shades of meaning. (And an even more limited grasp of some of the fundamentals of Spanish, I suppose) And since the source material is all ancient texts, you can't even pep the teaching up with some relevant and modern material or motivate the students by the prospect they can use it to backpack in Peru or do language exchange in Madrid. I'm not persuaded that the inadequacy of languages teaching is an argument for the same time to be devoted to devoted to something which is even further removed from being useful and the teacher is even less likely to be adequately equipped to teach.
    - panglott 11y ago
      These days we have good models for how to teach bilingualism to kids: dual-language immersion schools, in which both languages are used extensively in coursework. The problem is that this labor-intensive model will be impractical outside metropolitan areas with school choice, or communities with a strong heritage language community. Latin may not be a living language, but it remains very widely used in scientific terminology, law, religion, and elsewhere. Like the prestigious national languages, it is a mark of erudition and social status; the demonstration of which is itself a purpose of education.
- jerf 11y ago
  I'll be more bold than panglott... we can't "give up" teaching modern foreign languages, because we already don't teach modern foreign languages. I took four years of high school French, and got decent grades. I recently started reviewing and learning more through flashcards in Anki. On the one hand, the fours years of "study" put enough French in my head that I'm making progress this way... on the other hand, as I continue making what is frankly a great deal more progress with the spaced-repitition than I ever made in school I still can't help but notice I still can not fluently read much of anything, let alone speak or hear it. Now, as it is common on the Internet to confuse saying something is true with advocating for that fact, let me say that A: I still think learning a language is a good idea, I just don't think what we have now can actually be called "learning a language" and B: if we were ever allowed to change The Holy Curriculum [1], there's probably more effective ways to teach a foreign language. I can't help but notice that my Anki-based studies are wildly more effective than what I tried to do in school. (They're also still inadequate on their own so far. No contradiction there... my schooling was even more inadequate, you see.) Four years of a properly-researched and developed language program, with proper software support, might have produced someone at least capable of using the language at the end. [1]: A phrase I am settling in on to indicate my contempt for the idea that we need to deeply reform education, but we must do so under the constraint that nobody is ever allowed to remove, add, reorder, or change anything we do, ever.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Language study is tough in high school. A better case can be made for teaching languages as early as possible (pre-K, K-6). My nephew's Catholic school is teaching him Spanish[1] in pre-K and will continue until 8th grade. I took Dakota (not to be confused with Lakota) in high school. I couldn't really speak it then or now[2], but it did stick with me[3], but I see the children who learned it in K-6 did much better. 1) My parents and I recently took my 5 year old nephew with us on vacation to DC. He tends to sing at that age. We were in an elevator and he started in on a song and a couple from Spain started asking me questions about it. I really could only say he was being taught Spanish at his school. 2) I just cannot do a guttural with my voice. It sounds like I'm coughing. I have such a low voice anyway that it sounds wrong all the way around. At least I learned from a male instructor, that's a bit important as the sexes speak differently in Dakota. My old boss, a female, learned to speak from her uncles and her aunts thought she "spoke like a man". 3) I still do server names in Dakota. wanca is my #1 server.
striking 11y ago
As someone who knows the Polish language: I agree with you. With the Esperanto part, at least. Latin's very mentally stimulating, but more useless than a modern language, so I wouldn't quite agree with learning it.
- panglott 11y ago
  I think we have some strange ideas about how and why studying languages are "useful". Most Americans are monolingual English speakers, and almost by definition can't study a language that's more "useful" than English. There are large cognitive benefits to bi- and multilingualism, but for these it doesn't actually matter what language you speak: a heritage or minority language is as good as anything else. But the classroom model of the United States isn't actually designed to make people multilingual; if anything, it's the opposite. The default language policy of the United States is mostly to shift people to English monolingualism, no matter their circumstances, heritage, or language rights.
psychometry 11y ago
The point is that many students continue learning that language past that one year. It's much better to give students practical skills in a living language.
- panglott 11y ago
  What percentage of American high-school students who take their mandatory year of foreign language continue on to speak that language proficiently and competently? What "practical skills"? The supposed economic value from learning modern national languages is wildly overstated, for English monolinguals. It's better to learn languages because learning languages is valuable for its own sake, and pick the language you learn simply because you like it. There is a huge disconnect between our implicit goals for language learning in this country and the effort we expend upon it. I strongly believe in the value of language education, but given the amount of time and money we're willing to spend on it, we'd get as much or more benefit from making them study Latin. With Latin, all the people who want to learn a Romance language would get a leg up on it, and all the people who want to study biology would get a leg up on that, and people who are fine with just speaking English will get more insight into their own language.
  - psychometry 11y ago
    Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition. What's wildly overstated is the benefit learning Latin has on anything other than taking the SAT. Studying French is much more beneficial to speaking French than studying Latin and I shouldn't have to explain why that is the case.
    - mason240 11y ago
      >Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition. Let's be honest here - nothing of value is lost. The opportunity costs of even one year of any non-English language for American HS students makes it simply not worth it.
ketralnis 11y ago
> should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto Why teach Latin, Greek, or Esperanto badly? How does that help? And if you can solve the "badly" problem, why not teach something that can be used day-to-day?
- panglott 11y ago
  That most Americans do not have occasion to speak a language other than English day to day is exactly the reason most of them will not learn another language. The "badly" problem is actually a really huge one.
jkot 11y ago
Why? I have basic french and german and it was usefull many times.
ajkjk 11y ago
I'm honestly surprised to learn that anyone defends learning Latin outside of academic scholarship. I guess I feel the same about Greek but no one learns that in the US so it's less argued about. I took Latin in high school and felt that I wasted four years I could have spent learning (rudimentary) Spanish, or at least something that had any cultural relevance at all. You have to find a way to make kids care about it as well as justifying its utility. I see Latin and Greek education as historical relics, akin to how we used to emphasizing testing students' ability to construct shapes with compasses and straightedges, or their ability to memorize bible verses.
- panglott 11y ago
  On a day to day basis, the average American is simply actually a lot likelier to encounter Latin biological nomenclature or legal or religious terminology than, say, a fluent conversation in German. The United States is largely monolingual in English for a thousand miles, and the language ideology here causes immigrants to want their children to shift to English monolingualism as quickly as possible. And thus bad Latin is more useful than bad German.
  - freehunter 11y ago
    The real problem I run into as someone who speaks English natively and German as a second language is, outside of the Internet and reading books, I never have a chance to speak German. Even in the actual country of Germany, I speak German just bad enough that I can tell it's painful for people to listen to me struggle, and they'll quickly switch to English if they know it (which they do). The only benefit is I know what the weather forecast will be and I know what the announcements at the Bahnhof mean, so I know what train to get on. I've visited Mexico with my Spanish-speaking wife (semi-natively) and while the locals loved to hear her speak their language, we communicated mostly in English if we wanted to be easily understood. The struggle is real for Americans, or for native English speakers as a whole. For Americans, there is no other language spoken for thousands of miles like you mentioned (Mexico and Quebec (to a limited extent)), and even then, most of the people we interact with on vacation will speak English. I put serious effort into maintain my German, and she puts serious effort into maintaining her Spanish. But we rarely have the chance to actually use it, even if we're in a country that speaks the language. English has won.
bkeroack 11y ago
Guess what determines school curricula in most cases? The opinions of the parents who care enough to go to school board meetings, serve on the board or complain to officials.
Jach 11y ago
I took 5 years of French, 3 years of Latin. I enjoyed them up until the last ~75% or so of my senior year when I was really sick of the whole high school business. I don't think the Latin had outside utility of any sort until the 2nd or 3rd year simply because I didn't have the vocabulary (and I, like the vast majority of people, was unaware of spaced repetition and hated non-spaced repetition flashcards). The study of French and Roman culture and history was more interesting (and also fun when done in the respective languages) but due to the lack of slow history (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/09/slow-history-and-mysterious-20th.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/09/slow-hi...) in modern education I'd say its utility was limited. That utility I got from Latin the language was mainly in deciphering a few words (or contemplating a deeper meaning behind them) instead of reaching for Google's "define:word" -- but my vocabulary has lapsed and I don't care to refresh it. The other form of utility was minor because I had already studied French for two years, and that utility is contemplation of different grammatical forms and how language is structured, which can improve communication skills. I had a great English grammar class in 8th grade, and that was basically it for serious study of English grammar, but learning French allowed me to reflect more on language grammar in general so when Latin came along it was just another thing to reflect on rather than starting the reflection itself, very marginal utility. But these utilities really don't justify the classes and resources on their own... If we want high school to produce the greatest amount of utilons, we should be explicit about that, but then many many things will need to change. I believe English should be the world language, there's no practical reason to teach anything else at the expense of other more practical things to teach (like programming), especially in English speaking countries. If we want high school to more approximate what Universities used to represent, such as encouraging more Intellectualism (which I don't think is all that great, at least society-wide, from a utility perspective...), we should be explicit about that too, and again things will change. You might want to have students study French, Greek, Latin, Lojban, etc. for at least 2 years each because of Intellectualism -- but you may also want to balance that with more modern things like deeper computer science or math or physics, which won't help most people in their future lives either but can at least be fun and intellectually interesting for people who want their Intellectualism a certain way. Or we can try for a mix, but I'd propose that our current system is a mix, and other mixes will inevitably resemble the current system by being one-size-fits-all and not work too well. So if we want both, separate. Bring back trade schools and let young teenagers wholly uninterested in purely intellectual pursuits get to doing more interesting things like building a house or building JavaEE applications, and let the intellectuals do their thing without constantly having to waste time and energy rationalizing some vague utility and relevance to their proof-carrying code research.
intopieces 11y ago
Languages are not just languages. They're also a component of a wider culture. Foreign language education exposes students to cultures and ways of thinking not present in their day to day culture and allows them to understand and possibly communicate with people around them who speak that language (living in central Texas, you ought to know a bit of Spanish).

baddox 11y ago

Speaking of constructed languages, you might find Lojban interesting. It is "a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic." I have read most of the official language description. It's a compelling book not just about Lojban, but about logic and English grammar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://mw.lojban.org/papri/the_Complete_Lojban_Language http://mw.lojban.org/papri/the_Complete_Lojban_Language

tmalsburg2 11y ago
There is a reason why human languages evolved to have syntactic ambiguity: better throughput. Psycholinguistic research is obsessed with syntactic ambiguities (and there are good reasons for that) but in real life these ambiguities are pretty much always resolved by other sources of information: context, prosody, world-knowledge, social cues. If you disambiguate a language on the syntaxtic level you're basically just adding excessive redundancy. There are special niches where disambiguating information is scarce or where any misinterpretation could have catastophic consequences (e.g., aviation handbooks) but outside these domains the absence of syntactic ambiguity is hardly a desirable property.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  International diplomacy?
  - tmalsburg2 11y ago
    There you can always ask for clarification. I'm not aware of any war that has been started because of a syntactic ambiguity. But when your plane is about to crash or when your nuclear reactor is threatening to melt down, you may not be able to get a clarification.
- baddox 11y ago
  I don't think that syntactic ambiguity is particularly crucial to throughput. There is still plenty of semantic ambiguity possible in Lojban, and from what I have seen Lojban doesn't seem to have particularly lower throughput than natural languages.

athenot 11y ago

All languages have a culture associated to them. It's hard to dissociate the culture from the language. Even English, which is used in different cultures, has local optimizations when it is used daily. Latin is bound to an ancient culture (and a religious one). Even Klingon and Quenya are bound to the universes and cultures created by their authors & fan bases. But I don't see any culture associated with Esperanto. I'm wondering if things might be different if its proponents started associating with a niche culture (be it business) and then expand out to encompass things from everyday life. I don't know what the answer is…

panglott 11y ago
There is a very distinctive culture to Esperanto: people who continue to hope for positive social transformation and international and intercultural harmony. Esperantist and conlanger William Annis (on the Conlangery podcast) said something to the effect that, if you go to a Esperanto congress, you should start with the default assumption that everyone you meet is a gay vegetarian. [1] I cannot speak to the truth of this myself ;) [1] http://conlangery.com/2011/12/05/94/ http://conlangery.com/2011/12/05/94/
- neverartful 11y ago
  That sounds more like a philosophy than a culture.
  - schoen 11y ago
    There is even an Esperantist movement that explicitly argues that it's a culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raumism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raumism

martinrue 11y ago

For anyone interested in learning a little more about Esperanto, Duolingo just put their Esperanto course into public beta and there's a good amount of learning content already: https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto-Online https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto-Online. There's also http://lernu.net http://lernu.net, probably the most well-known source of Esperanto news, lessons and other stuff. Amuziĝu!

rmxt 11y ago
Came here to share the good news about Esperanto on Duolingo, too! Duolingo is fantastic and I am addicted to keeping my streak alive. However, I find the lack of variety and relative rigidity of the sentences to be offputting over time. I've nearly completed two trees, and have been a pretty consistent user over the past 3 years, so sometimes the monotony of the sentences drags me down. I have to imagine that we (collectively) are very close to having a sentence generator that can throw together a pertinent and sensical verb phrase and noun phrase that differs just slightly from the curated/created sentences, at least for the Indo-European languages.

Red_Tarsius 11y ago

I've always thought Esperanto to be an incredibly bad idea. http://xkcd.com/927/?cmpid=pscau http://xkcd.com/927/?cmpid=pscau

lamby 11y ago
Not really. Surely the real problem is that learning Esperanto means you can now talk to people who, well, are the kind of people who learnt Esperanto...
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  http://xkcd.com/191/ http://xkcd.com/191/
  - iamcurious 11y ago
    I'm surprised no one has made a here-is-the-right-xkcd-comic-for-this-situation bot.
erikb 11y ago
This is the perfect post for a more in depth argumentation. Otherwise there is not much discussion value here, only disturbance.
freehunter 11y ago
Esperanto has some incredibly good aspects to it, though. The biggest, of course, is that learning Esperanto (which is very easy to do) helps tremendously with learning other languages. So it doesn't really matter if you think Esperanto is an incredibly bad idea, Esperanto is an incredibly good idea if you're looking to learn other languages afterwards. It's not just another standard. It's a great learning aid. "A group of European secondary school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a control group, who studied French for all four years." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Third-language_acquisition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Third-language_acquis...

tokenadult 11y ago

From the article: "Four people had been listed as 'attending' on the Facebook page for the event, but by the time the meeting began, eight Esperantists were sitting in a rough semicircle of dormroom couches and hard plastic chairs." Ladies and gentlemen, that is in New York City, where a social club meeting on almost any topic might be expected to attract more attendance. Esperanto has severe growth problems if that is how interesting it is to prospective learners. I have used some Esperanto textbooks to learn a bit of Esperanto, and I have read whole books about the artificial language movement and the development of Esperanto over time. If we take Esperanto to be a hobby, like stamp collecting, then I say "More power to you" if you are interested in Esperanto. But if we take Esperanto as a serious proposal to produce a practical "interlanguage" for worldwide communication, then we have to count Esperanto as a failure. Esperanto has had fewer speakers (to a given level of proficiency) and fewer readers (likewise) in all time than either English or Chinese gains in one year simply by natural increase and extension of education to the masses. As I studied Esperanto, along with studying human languages such as Chinese (four modern Sinitic languages and also ancient Literary Chinese), Russian, German, Japanese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic Greek and Koine Greek, and assorted other languages, I was struck by how many design bugs Esperanto has. Many of the decisions made by Ludwik Zamenhof as he designed Esperanto reflected exactly the languages he knew in childhood in Russian-occupied Poland, but didn't reflect at all what makes a language easy to learn or to use as a second language with speakers of varied backgrounds. I used to think that I would have to do a write-up about the flaws of Esperanto myself, but then in the 1990s I discovered an online description of Esperanto by a sophisticated student of constructed languages,[1] and I see by checking the link again that that description has been continually updated over the last two decades. The statement in the article kindly submitted here that "Esperanto is an artificial language, designed to have perfectly regular grammar, with none of the messy exceptions of natural tongues" is demonstrably false, and the link I have shared here will show the statement to be false. What ultimately turned me off to Esperanto as a movement and even as a hobby was seeing frankly incredible statements about Esperanto and about other human languages made by Esperanto-hobbyists who thought they were proposing a practical tool for world communication. If Esperanto is your hobby, more power to you. But if you propose Esperanto as a world interlanguage, you had best acknowledge the reality that Esperanto has always failed in that role, and always will. [1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

splat 11y ago

It's not often mentioned as a reason to learn Esperanto, but the literature of Esperanto is really quite wonderful and makes learning the language well worth it. I've only read a handful of books in Esperanto so far, but it has been an excellent way to read first-hand accounts of people writing about their own cultures and experiences. Last night I finished reading Vikitmoj (Victims) by Julio Baghy. The book is a semi-autobiographical story of the author's experiences in a Siberian prisoner of war camp after WWI. It's a fascinating glimpse into life in these camps and how the different populations (POWs, soldiers, peasants, Jews, bolsheviks, etc.) all interacted with each other. As an example, one practice Baghy writes of is a kind of "duel" that the POWs would sometimes engage in between each other. (In the book it came out that one of the POWs had been sleeping with the wife of another of the POWs back before they had been captured.) They weren't allowed weapons, so they had to be a little creative. They would draw lots and the loser would have to provoke the soldiers on one of their marches so that the soldiers would beat him (sometimes to death). If you learn any national language, you'll be able to read people in a handful of cultures write about themselves in their own words. But one of the unique features of Esperanto is that after you learn it, you can read the works of people in cultures all across the globe without the need of a translator as intermediary. (Of course the subset of people in a culture who write in Esperanto is not representative of the general population, but it's better than nothing!) In particular, many of these works haven't been translated into English (or any other language for that matter), so you would have no way to read them otherwise anyway!

colindean 11y ago
Ĉu vi legis libron "Marvirinstrato"? Mi posedas ĝin ekde liberigo, sed mia Esperanto ŝajnas esti tro baza eternale :-( http://www.amazon.com/Marvirinstrato-Originalaj-noveloj-Esperanto-Edition/dp/1439236348 http://www.amazon.com/Marvirinstrato-Originalaj-noveloj-Espe...
- splat 11y ago
  Ne, bedaŭrinde mi ne tre familiaras kun la esperantliteraturo. Ĝi ŝajnas interese, tamen! Se vi volas pli facile legeblaj libroj, mi rekomendas Faktoj kaj Fantazioj de Marjorie Boulton. Ĝi ne estas tro malfacila, sed tre amuziga!

coolguy43 11y ago

That is good for esperanto. I study chinese online at http://preply.com/en/chinese-by-skype http://preply.com/en/chinese-by-skype and I really think learning a new language like esperanto has a lot of benefits.

coolguy43 11y ago

Speaking of other languages like esperanto, I teach speaking english like a native at http://preply.com/en/skype/english-native-speakers http://preply.com/en/skype/english-native-speakers

7erb 11y ago

I'm working on a conlang called 7erb (pronounced Verb). It's a language of only seven (7) words in its entire vocabulary. Here's what I got so far: - All seven words in the vocabulary are a negative. A word means "everything but that word. Words are then "stacked" to be more "anti-specific" - 7erb is completely present-tense. Past and future are not acknowledged - Anything in this world that can be evaluated in various ways depending upon arbitrary conditions are generally avoided in 7erb. 7erb is a language of reality, not subjectivity and opinion. There are no words in 7erb that function as adjectives - However, vocal pitch and tonality can indicate degrees of closeness, height, intensity etc. In written form, this can be expressed with bold text, underscoring etc If anyone is interested in developing this new language, please contact me (see my profile).