4 ms·

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...
- iamcurious 11y ago
  Interesting. Naturally, that only gives me more questions. Is the effect limited to French? For instance, is it also a good for learning Chinese? Is the effect stronger of weaker than learning a romance language for the same amount of time before learning French? This[1] cite from Wikipedia seems to hint so. I'm not sure how trustworthy it is. But even then, it raises the question of how much of the effect depends on having better motivated teachers. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040301110515/http://www.education.monash.edu.au/projects/esperanto/Reprs97.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20040301110515/http://www.educati...
  - freehunter 11y ago
    Logically Esperanto would give you a bigger boost in European languages, since it's a European based language. However, if the innovation is in teaching methods, you might also see a boost in other languages as well, though I wouldn't expect nearly as much.
- gkya 11y ago
  Well, this is for esperanto being a conlang that is borrowing mostly from romance, slavic and germanic languages and indo-european languages in general. I have been studying italian for about 6 months, and I can comprehend written french and portuguese, and written/spoken spanish to an extent, all of which are romance languages i.e. latin descendants. And I have not really studied these languages. So esperanto is no special case here, it is not the magical special key to learn all the other languages.
  - freehunter 11y ago
    You're right, it's easier to learn a third language than it is a second. But Esperanto is super easy to learn in the first place, it gets you to learning your third language that much quicker.
yiyus 11y ago
It is not the same case. Esperanto was one of the first attempts. Now that we have Esperanto, Intelingua, Ido, Novial, and many others I have not even hear about, trying again with a new international language would be a good reason to post this comic. But when Esperanto was developed, a simple artificial language was a very innovative idea. Although it was not very successful, I think it was worth a try.
- BillChapman 11y ago
  Unlike you, I see Esperanto as a remarkable success story. It has survived wars and revolutions and economic crises and continues to attract people to learn and speak it. Esperanto works. I’ve used it in about seventeen countries over recent years. I recommend it to anyone, as a way of making friendly local contacts in other countries.
  - yiyus 11y ago
    It depends how you define success. It is indeed a remarkable achievement to have survived this long and have a (growing? I think so) speaker community, and I could agree it is worth learning. But the goal was not to just work, or have a small community of speakers. It aimed to become a world-wide known language for international communication. In this sense, it would need to have an importance of the order English has today to be considered a success, so I think that "not very successful" is even a bit too generous.
Retra 11y ago
By that argument, any good idea is a incredibly bad idea when people attempt to copy or improve it. And that's not the road you want to go down...

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...

iamcurious 11y ago
Interesting. Naturally, that only gives me more questions. Is the effect limited to French? For instance, is it also a good for learning Chinese? Is the effect stronger of weaker than learning a romance language for the same amount of time before learning French? This[1] cite from Wikipedia seems to hint so. I'm not sure how trustworthy it is. But even then, it raises the question of how much of the effect depends on having better motivated teachers. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040301110515/http://www.education.monash.edu.au/projects/esperanto/Reprs97.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20040301110515/http://www.educati...
- freehunter 11y ago
  Logically Esperanto would give you a bigger boost in European languages, since it's a European based language. However, if the innovation is in teaching methods, you might also see a boost in other languages as well, though I wouldn't expect nearly as much.
gkya 11y ago
Well, this is for esperanto being a conlang that is borrowing mostly from romance, slavic and germanic languages and indo-european languages in general. I have been studying italian for about 6 months, and I can comprehend written french and portuguese, and written/spoken spanish to an extent, all of which are romance languages i.e. latin descendants. And I have not really studied these languages. So esperanto is no special case here, it is not the magical special key to learn all the other languages.
- freehunter 11y ago
  You're right, it's easier to learn a third language than it is a second. But Esperanto is super easy to learn in the first place, it gets you to learning your third language that much quicker.

yiyus 11y ago

It is not the same case. Esperanto was one of the first attempts. Now that we have Esperanto, Intelingua, Ido, Novial, and many others I have not even hear about, trying again with a new international language would be a good reason to post this comic. But when Esperanto was developed, a simple artificial language was a very innovative idea. Although it was not very successful, I think it was worth a try.

BillChapman 11y ago
Unlike you, I see Esperanto as a remarkable success story. It has survived wars and revolutions and economic crises and continues to attract people to learn and speak it. Esperanto works. I’ve used it in about seventeen countries over recent years. I recommend it to anyone, as a way of making friendly local contacts in other countries.
- yiyus 11y ago
  It depends how you define success. It is indeed a remarkable achievement to have survived this long and have a (growing? I think so) speaker community, and I could agree it is worth learning. But the goal was not to just work, or have a small community of speakers. It aimed to become a world-wide known language for international communication. In this sense, it would need to have an importance of the order English has today to be considered a success, so I think that "not very successful" is even a bit too generous.

Retra 11y ago

By that argument, any good idea is a incredibly bad idea when people attempt to copy or improve it. And that's not the road you want to go down...