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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

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.

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.