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Esperanto helping with Japanese - captainporridge - 2014-12-09
A while ago there was a thread asking if Esperanto helps to learn Japanese. Predictably it got out of control, but I saw it today and thought I could write a bit about this. I'm going to show a few more concrete examples. Here's the old thread: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=777&page=1
EDIT 2015.01.17:
Wow, okay.... my mind is blown after further working on Esperanto-Japanese lessons. It's partially "Esperanto helps way more than I thought when I first started this thread" and partially "I had no idea that lessons for English-speakers to learn Japanese were as bad as they are".
Just a sample of the stuff that suddenly became incredibly simple/easy:
- relatively a lot of seemingly unrelated usages or meanings (according to lessons for English speakers), became otherwise, especially regarding vocabulary and particles but also with some things like compound verbforms.
- koto / ji / mono / no / etc. as in their meaning differences and when to use them. i never got that far in japanese grammar before now, so i don't know, but someone told me this is "very nuanced" so i assume it's advanced and difficult otherwise. it seems a lot of people online have difficulties with the "nominalization" or "nounization".
- so-called "i-adjectives" work exactly like esperanto verbs, while the na-adjectives are just like esperanto adjectives. of course the all the other verbs (ending in u etc) also work just like esperanto verbs.
- most things about the te-forms, especially when it's just two verbs "chained" together. though i didn't think much about te-form to begin with, it seems a lot of english-speakers have tons of trouble with it when i search online.
- the english dictionaries tend to give really misleading or sometimes wrong definitions of words. for example, they'll make a japanese noun sound like an adjective, or sometimes the word meaning is wrong altogether (according to multiple japanese-esperanto dictionaries, and me checking to see if the esperanto meaning fits more than the english meaning). so it's no wonder that so many english-speakers have difficulty with japanese... it's being taught entirely wrong!!
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Here is an example lessons I started making in Esperanto to learn Japanese. The sentences are colour-coded, so you can see how closely the Esperanto can copy the Japanese structure. (There's more lessons on the main site. None of them are finished but you get the idea.)
http://marbuljon.neocities.org/tutorials/jpgram/particles.html
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Here's a bit of what I originally posted as the topic of this thread:
The similarities that are most obvious and needing the least explanation is that the basic number system is fairly similar (十二、二十 - dekdu, dudek - "ten-two, two-ten" twelve, twenty) in both languages. Likewise changing from "two, second; thirty, thirtieth" is just a matter of an addition (ex. 一、一番 - unu, unua - one, first). As in Chinese, or so I hear, we have for example "two out-of-hundred-ly (du elcente)" to mean 2%, I don't know how Japanese says this so sorry, but maybe some other math stuff is similar.
Likewise some demonstrative pronouns and so on have a similar logic. ここ ĉi tie, here; そこ tie, there; どこ kie, where (all ending in こ in Japanese and "ie" in Esperanto). こんな ĉi tia, like this, そんな tia, like that, どんな kia, like what. And so on.
In general Esperanto has prefixes and suffixes that correspond to the Japanese ones even when English can't translate them well. The same goes for particles and so on; even if in Esperanto this word was a preposition, we simply turn it into an adjective and slip it into the same place in the sentence as the Japanese postposition/particle is. The only ones Esperanto is really lacking an equivalent for, that I have seen so far, have been the politeness ones (o, go, mi - 御、神) and then the "quoting particle", but it's no worse than English in that regard.
Note that even while Esperanto CAN copy the Japanese very closely, that doesn't mean the average author or translator does. That's not because it would be wrong in Esperanto grammar, it's simply because people follow trends from others and so most people write in a sentence structure closer to English.
Here are some sentence examples, but I would say to just look at the links above because it's much easier with colour-coding. The English is a direct translation of the Esperanto, not of the Japanese.
私は若くない - Mi nejunas - "I not-young-am", I'm not young.
Esperanto can say this in a few different ways but this one is closest to the Japanese.
新しい学校から教授に手紙を出しなさい - nova lernejo (cia) ele, instruiston/profesoron leterosendu
"new learn-place (your) out-of-ily, instructor/professor letter-send" - send a letter to your professor from your new school.
あの犬を抱いているのはだれですか？ - Tiu hundoĉirkaŭprenanto, kiu estas?
"That hound-around-holder, who is?" Who is the person (currently) hugging that dog?
田中さんの話によれば、総理大臣はもうすぐ内閣改造を行う予定です。
Tanaka S-ra parolo laŭe, (la) ĉefministro baldaŭege kabinetoreformon (mem)faros atende.
"Tanaka Mr. talk along, (the) chief-minister soon-big-ly cabinet-reform (self)will-do expectedly."
According to Mr. Tanaka's speech, (the) prime minister is expected to do a cabinet-reform very soon.
I'm not good enough at grammar or Japanese or anything to fix that "expectedly"...
—————————————— Tiny helpful things:
1. There is a pronoun that we use when the gender of the subject is unknown or in-between genders (someone else's pets. babies, etc.) and so we can translate Japanese sentences without assuming a gender, unlike in English where it sounds wrong sometimes. Ex. we can indeed say "that (person)" or "it" instead of "he/she".
2. Esperanto can use the distinction between "thou (you, singular)" and "ye (you lot)" (ci, vi) and thus あなた and あなたたち.
3. There's newspapers, magazines, twitters, websites and blogs written by Japanese natives who are also fluent in Esperanto, sometimes (especially, in the case of the blogs) they write these bilingually, so you have text + translation. I've even found Okinawan + Esperanto translation. You can also, it seems, a bit more easily find a native Japanese speaker who's fluent in Esperanto, than one who's fluent in English (perhaps if just because they're more concentrated on one website : P ).
4. A lot of words can be said in multiple ways in Esperanto and sound completely natural. Ex. "navy member" could be written as "sea military member", "opposite of land-military-member", "military person at sea", "sea soldier", "sea battle professional", and so on. So while we can say that it opens the eyes to how compounding can work, the most relevant application is that we can often a bit more closely copy Japanese compounds, including things like the meaning of someone's last name or a place name, without it sounding weird at all.
5. I have heard people say that it was easier for them to make good Japanese friends through Esperanto than through English, because when using English they were treated as a sort of "free ticket to English lessons" or "some weird foreigner" whereas with Esperanto they were treated a lot more normally. I have no experience myself but I can say that it sounds believable.
6. As with Esperanto in general for any country, you can find someone to stay with for free or to at least guide you around, in Japan, if you are a fellow Esperanto speaker. So if you are looking to travel there and don't have much money, this way you wouldn't have to pay hotel costs (sometimes you can also get meals for free), plus you are staying with native Japanese people and can practise the language or ask them questions etc much more easily, compared to if you have bad Japanese or were relying on them knowing some English for example.
The first method to find a host is to contact various local clubs directly (there's a post later in this thread with some of the towns that have clubs in them) and ask if any members can put you up for a while; many people use this method as there are a lot of people who may be willing to host but who don't use the internet or don't want to put their info up online. The second method is to use a website called "pasporta servo" (pasport service) and contact people directly who are already willing to host anyone, any time of year. Usually people stay with multiple hosts and travel to different towns. The website was down for quite a while and only got put back up and working a few weeks ago so right now there's only about 20 Japanese hosts listed but there might be more in the future.
—————————————— Bonuses mostly only for people who haven't learnt another language before:
1. It teaches you all about basic grammar, as in once you're good at Esperanto you always know when to correctly use an adverb, when a participle, and so on. It does this much faster than any grammar course in English would, since Esperanto is so regular and English isn't. It also gives you general confidence in studying + practising + "yeah, I can in fact learn a language and other people can in fact understand me".
2. The vocabulary of Japanese is very small (especially compared to English, but it's also smaller than Swedish's for example). Esperanto's is also very small, and I imagine even smaller than Japanese's though I'm not sure. So learning Esperanto helps you "focus" your thinking and teaches you how to say things "simply". While this isn't a problem for most people in the world, it's usually difficult for an English native speaker to get used to not having 50 synonyms and so on. (If you don't believe me on this... I'm a hobby-translator who lives abroad and hobby-teaches languages, and I have definitely seen not just trends and comments from other English natives, but also have my own experiences to draw from.)
3. It clears up some vocabulary difficulties, especially when relating to dictionary use. For example, "to think" in English can mean "to think thoughts; have the opinion of; guess", and "to try" means both "to test something out; to attempt to do". In Esperanto these are all different verbs. It may not seem like much but trust me, it shaves off a LOT of time from learning if you don't have the problem where the English word has 50 definitions and so you use the Japanese word wrong...
—————————————— Shortfalls:
1. Esperanto doesn't have counters or many politeness words, in those departments it's about as bad as English (it only basically has words like "please" and "majesty, highness, misses" etc). Although it does have nickname/diminuative suffixes (ex. ちゃん) there's only two, one for specifically-females and one for "everyone".
2. Predictably there is a lack of certain words regarding traditional items, sound effects, slang and so on. I'm not sure just how bad the problem is exactly, because for example both ancient Chinese texts and modern Japanese crime novels have been translated into Esperanto and they made it work somehow. So I imagine this problem is just slightly better, or maybe just as bad, as compared to when translating from Japanese to English.
3. In some wordforms Esperanto is more exact than Japanese, for example Esperanto has an explicit future tense form (including with the Japanese te-form). Also, Esperanto only has one personal pronoun for each thing. This can be worked around by translating the personal pronoun directly (ex. "Servant"), and just writing a note about it at the top of the text. Or one can do what English does, simply translating them all as "I".
————————————————
So, I hope this post helps anyone who might wonder about this in the future. I'll answer any questions I can, if anyone has any.
Esperanto helping with Japanese - raharney - 2014-12-09
@captainporridge
Very interesting post. Well written. Well done.
I have some questions if you have time to answer:
[1] How widespread is Esperanto in Japan? Is there a club in every city?
[2] How long did it take you to learn Esperanto, as in, get fluent in it. ("Fluent" here being defined in the common sense meaning of being able to comfortably talk it, read it etc.).
[3] Are you familiar with the hypothesis that Esperanto is a "gateway language" for other languages, that is, elementary school children who study Esperanto learn other European languages quicker. Any thoughts on that?
Bonŝancon!
Esperanto helping with Japanese - vonPeterhof - 2014-12-10
raharney Wrote:[3] Are you familiar with the hypothesis that Esperanto is a "gateway language" for other languages, that is, elementary school children who study Esperanto learn other European languages quicker. Any thoughts on that?Isn't that exactly what captainporridge was talking about here?
captainporridge Wrote:It teaches you all about basic grammar, as in once you're good at Esperanto you always know when to correctly use an adverb, when a participle, and so on. It also gives you general confidence in studying + practising + "yeah, I can in fact learn a language and other people can in fact understand me".Personally, I think that if you're monolingual, aren't really interested in any foreign language in particular, and want to become multilingual, then it makes sense to start from Esperanto and later proceed to natural languages. If you're monolingual and want to learn Japanese specifically, then just go ahead and study Japanese. Why waste your time on a language you're not interested in when there's one you are interested in?
Also,
captainporridge Wrote:The vocabulary of Japanese is very small (especially compared to English, but it's also smaller than Swedish's for example). Esperanto's is also very small, and I imagine even smaller than Japanese's though I'm not sure.[citation needed]
Esperanto helping with Japanese - raharney - 2014-12-10
vonPeterhof Wrote:Not really. I am asking specifically about children learning it before they learn French, German or whatever. There has been research into this and just wondering if captainporridge, as an Esperantist, has heard much about this or seen much of this in practice. I get the point about a regulated language acting as a conscious exemplar for would-be language learners, but I am wondering about actual results on the fluency-acquisition front.raharney Wrote:[3] Are you familiar with the hypothesis that Esperanto is a "gateway language" for other languages, that is, elementary school children who study Esperanto learn other European languages quicker. Any thoughts on that?Isn't that exactly what captainporridge was talking about here?
Esperanto helping with Japanese - captainporridge - 2014-12-10
How widespread is Esperanto in Japan? Is there a club in every city?
We can guess a little. On the new "Pasporta Servo" (homestay website for Esperanto speakers where normally you can stay for free at someone's house), even though it was just very recently set up after it was closed down for some years, there are about 20 Japanese people who are willing to let people stay with them. Though I imagine that most of the speakers in Japan are older and not so visible online : P Here you can see the geographical spread of the hosts:
http://www.pasportaservo.org/esplori/?q=japanio&gps_coords=
If you compare those 20 people, currently Italy and Denmark also have the same number of hosts (France has around 200 so...)
The "Japan-Esperanto Congress (convention)" has apparently been held about 100 times in various parts of Japan, here is a list of places and number of attendees (though of course not all of the attendees would be Japanese):
http://www.jei.or.jp/hp/materialo/eks_jk_e.htm
The 47th "Esperanto Seminar" appears to be a sort of "come here and we teach you lessons", held at the Tokia Sport and Culture Dome in 2014. Their brochure says you go there, take an exam and learn stuff, sleep there and there's food and things. The info is pretty lacking but it also doesn't look like they can hold so many people.
Among what's translated to Esperanto from Japanese, on this site there are Ainu stories (with parallel Ainu text) and noh comedies... but the site is predictably outdated, I think to get an real idea I would have to search a lot of various Esperanto e-bookstores and things.
http://www.jei.or.jp/hp/esp.htm
That site links to this site which has a rather confusing layout but has parallel Japanese-Esperanto texts:
http://www.wombat.zaq.ne.jp/esperanto/konzyaku/
Here are some Japanese Esperanto periodicals, but I don't know which ones are still published and which aren't:
"La Revuo Orienta", bilingual JP-EO, given out monthly.
"La Junuloj", bilingual, given out by the Japanese Youth Esperanto Association.
"La Movado", from the "Kansai League".
"Ponteto", by the "Kantou League".
"Japana Esperantisto" (no longer published I assume)
"Rondo Harmonia" seemingly with a Japanese version "La Harmonio", seems to have stopped being published in 2012 (not going to look further into it)
On lernu.net which is the main site for Esperanto learners and speakers to meet at (for lack of any better site), the Japanese forum has a total of 513 messages which is not very much. That's about the same as the Lithuanian and Dutch forums. From what I've seen the Japanese speakers (if they're not in the normal "Esperanto forum" instead of the "Japanese forum) tend to have their own personal website or blog or twitter, instead of going on forums and things, but I don't know.
I'm having a hard time finding an actual list of all the clubs... Well here, if you click on the links about the various regions at the top, it brings you to links below and some of those are links to Esperanto clubs. But to be honest we can't trust this either, as for example my own local club here in Sweden (Uppsala) has no website or online presence either : l
http://www.dmoz.org/World/Esperanto/Regionoj/Azio/Japanio/
EDIT: will write down names of clubs I find in a subsequent post.
How long did it take you to learn Esperanto... being able to comfortably talk it, read it etc.
Keep in mind that I am a reaaaaaaaally lazy "student". But after about a single month of slow lazy study, I could read a fiction novel in it with the same amount of ease/difficulty as I could in Swedish after studying Swedish for a year and a half (learning Swedish entirely in a homestay here in Sweden). Though I'm also a bad student with Swedish, it gives you an idea. I used the exact same fiction novel (The Brothers Lionheart - meaning this book was also my first attempt at reading a Swedish fiction novel). Maybe another month more to where I could read basically everything without a problem, I'm not sure. My listening skills rose at about exactly the same rate as my reading, as it just takes a tiny bit of listening until you can understand it all because there's no pronunciation irregularities (each letter makes the same sound in all cases).
There is a difference in reading texts written by "online people" and by "offline people". I mean a novel in Esperanto is going to be easier to read than a blog post by a hikikomori, because some of these youths really want to make up words and borrow words when it either makes zero sense or it's entirely unnecessary. For example, someone online might say "manga, drag queen" instead of "Japanese comic, transvestite", (transvestite in the basic sense of "wearing other clothes") and similarly bring in a lot of unnecessary loanwords or sometimes, weird meanings that only they understand, which makes reading very difficult. But in the novels I have read so far anyway, people haven't been doing that. It's just because the young internet-users typically haven't used Esperanto enough with enough other people to realize they're not using it correctly (as the goal is little vocabulary and always understandability).
...elementary school children who study Esperanto learn other European languages quicker. Any thoughts on that?
This has actually been proven in various small studies.
Here's one: http://www.esperantoresearch.org.uk/sites/default/files/site/files/esperanto_as_a_starter_language.pdf
More reports by the same group: http://www.esperantoresearch.org.uk/site/publications
There should be some in here (it's a collection of various older studies/notes on Esperanto) https://archive.org/details/esperantoasinter00leagrich
May be some here: http://www.cb.uu.se/esperanto/index.html
Isn't a study, but it's a Hungarian person talking about how they learnt Esperanto as their first foreign language in school and how it helped them - http://www.ipernity.com/blog/156463/526453
There are more but I didn't keep the links... you can probably find them by starting at Wikipedia and surfing around. The main problem is since the studies are always small since people don't have money, they always get mostly ignored, so ex. while we can find news articles on them or talks on youtube about them it's hard to find the actual papers on them. Also I'm sure there are some in Esperanto or other languages that aren't in English.
Also be careful on the "European language" bit, as for example comparing Hungarian to English is more like Japanese to English lol so some people may get irritated at that wording.
My own personal thoughts are that the benefits of Esperanto as the first foreign language for kids are obvious to anyone who looks at the grammar for a while - the language is basically like a linguistics version of LEGOs coupled with a "fun secret language". Kids already learn stuff like Pig Latin, this is just a bit more advanced. A kid can totally rearrange a sentence and make up totally weird new words and be completely understood. Later on, no matter how difficult it was for them to learn Esperanto in the beginning, you can explain a lot of grammar to them about their other language(s) by simply saying things like "well this English word is an o-word (substantive) in Esperanto" and they'll understand.
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If you're monolingual and want to learn Japanese specifically, then just go ahead and study Japanese. Why waste your time on a language you're not interested in when there's one you are interested in?
First, you should know that learning Esperanto is NOT a long trip, and that you don't have to quit learning Japanese in order to start learning Esperanto or something. An English native can learn Esperanto to fluency in 1-2 months (if they work hard). It's just like doing RTK or learning radicals before beginning real kanji studies. It's not the average "learn this other foreign language first, take five years off your life". And you don't have to learn it to fluency in order to get most/all of the benefits, you can just learnt it fairly well and quit there. And like RTK and radicals, some people like it and think it helped, others have no interest.
So it's just an appeal to the logic centre of your brain, saying "if you do this thing, you'll learn the language you really want faster or easier - don't you want that to happen?". It's just frankly much easier for most (not all) people to learn grammar through something like Esperanto, which marks its grammar forms so clearly that it basically acts like you colour-coded the page according to which forms are used where, than it is for them to study a book on grammar.
Also like was mentioned above, some cases you want to be able to more easily make friends without them thinking all the time that you're an -English- native, or maybe you just have little money and want to stay at a Japanese person's house for free during your holiday there lol.
Even if you only know English and learn Esperanto to the point where your grasp of basic grammar vastly improves, that doesn't mean you have to USE Esperanto, remember it for your whole life, like it, etc. It's just a tool, just like how after RTK or SRS memorization of vocab, after a while you can let go of it and don't need it anymore.
Anyway, no one is forcing anyone to learn Esperanto, or saying that you must learn Esperanto before any other language, or whatever. I'm just explaining things I can think of regarding how it helps in Japanese. I think that should be obvious, but some people maybe will misread my post or something.
While people I know have said "learning Esperanto helped me kill bad habits in Japanese" even when they were already fairly good at Japanese before learning Esperanto, they didn't give me specifics, so all the example sentences and stuff above just comes from me, who isn't very good at Japanese and can't see where all the help would be.
...Esperanto's is also very small, and I imagine even smaller than Japanese's though I'm not sure. [citation needed]
That was told to me by a Japanese family living in Sweden. My Swedish wife (who knows Japanese much better than I do) also agrees, so I just assume it's true. Though neither of them know Esperanto so they can't compare the vocabulary amount to Esperanto, I would just assume that due to Esperanto's nature it has a smaller one.
As for the other bit, anyone who's read a few forum threads for English/American immigrants knows how much people complain about things like "I can't say what I want since they have so few synonyms in this language", and it's also based on my own experience of lots of things like "what? you call prescription 'recipe', diabetes 'sugar sickness' and digestion 'melting'?? how lame" lol. Before of course I realized just how much ENGLISH was the weird language when it comes to vocabulary, comparatively worldwide. But what I mean is, the more other languages you learn, the better you get at this stuff like "figuring out how to get your meaning across when you don't now all the real words" but the smaller a vocabulary you're used to already, the easier that is.
Esperanto helping with Japanese - buonaparte - 2014-12-10
I've always been curious: Who decides what is correct in d-Esperanto? Anything goes?
In Japanese it's clear: I can always ask yudantaiteki, and he will gladly tell me.
In English it's clear, too. I can ask an educated native speaker (yudantaiteki or somebody else).
Esperanto helping with Japanese - ReneSac - 2014-12-10
raharney Wrote:[3] Are you familiar with the hypothesis that Esperanto is a "gateway language" for other languages, that is, elementary school children who study Esperanto learn other European languages quicker. Any thoughts on that?See this TEDx presentation about the experience with Springboard to Languages in UK. He likens esperanto with the recorder in music education:
http://youtu.be/8gSAkUOElsg
Esperanto helping with Japanese - captainporridge - 2014-12-10
buonaparte Wrote:I've always been curious: Who decides what is correct in d-Esperanto? Anything goes?There's things the original creator said when asked about grammar and so on, which have been collected into a book and people tend to read it. Slightly after its public birth, a sort of language council sprang up to help decide things and is still running today, but it is all very loose even so (they mostly seem to deal with "should we allow this new loanword to become official or not"). Often what people might say is "correct" is actually more like "this is how the trend has been so far" or "this is how most people say it".
The actual rules (ignoring ex. "an adverb isn't a noun") are just tiny things like "prepositions must go before the word they describe", with the example that there is no mention about if prepositions must have a space in-between them and the word they describe, and no mention about if prepositions can/can't be compounded. According to the creator guy, "what's correct" is almost always "what's understandable and what feels comfortable to you". So, for example, he said that you don't have to use the accusative case if the meaning of the sentence is clear without it due to context. He also wrote advice like "if you don't know when to use the definite article, simply don't use it".
In the end, you do get a lot of people who don't experiment, so ex. a lot of English natives write in Esperanto exactly as if they were writing in English (same sentence structure, same large lack of compounds, etc). That kind of thing gives the impression that the writing style that the biggest group of users uses is what's correct, but it's not really the case. I personally just ask someone else if they can understand what I meant and after that I don't bother being any more "correct" lol.
Esperanto helping with Japanese - ReneSac - 2014-12-10
buonaparte Wrote:I've always been curious: Who decides what is correct in d-Esperanto? Anything goes?First, you have the Fundamento de Esperanto. It is the unchangeable core of esperanto. Also, you have the Akademio de Esperanto, who tries to steward the evolution of the language (the language council that captainporridge mentioned).
In Japanese it's clear: I can always ask yudantaiteki, and he will gladly tell me.
In English it's clear, too. I can ask an educated native speaker (yudantaiteki or somebody else).
The equivalent to ask an native speaker is to ask an high level, experienced esperanto speaker. Well, you do have a couple hundred native esperanto speakers, and most native esperanto speakers are also high level experienced esperanto speakers, but unlike in natural languages, they don't have any special normative power.
Of course, esperanto evolves with it's use. This article describes the evolution of esperanto, and the little ways it deviated from the Fundamento in the last 120 years: http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/evolution.htm
It is a very interesting reading.
Esperanto helping with Japanese - captainporridge - 2014-12-10
ReneSac Wrote:Of course, esperanto evolves with it's use....I think this is a little misleading. In Esperanto, both the old ways and the new ways are still correct and proper. So it's still just as correct to learn your grammar style from a book from 1910 as it is from 2010. It's just trends, no grammar rules have actually been changed or officially declared obsolete, and so on. At least, as far as I've heard.
Anyway, I hope this thread can stay on topic, and try not to talk about Esperanto as if people have any idea about it, since most readers won't : PP It doesn't go just for Esperanto of course - I wouldn't expect readers on here to know anything about Swedish or about how it would help in learning Japanese, either.
Edit: hoho, i found something cute!
http://esperanto.cri.cn/261/2007/11/07/1@72265.htm
This lady who broadcasts from China in Esperanto (though she tends to get criticism since her accent is so thick and she's awkward at talking), visited a Japanese Esperanto club at a girl's school in Okayama, but if you click on the little headphones button you get to hear the Japanese girls speaking a bit too.
Esperanto helping with Japanese - john555 - 2014-12-10
I looked at Esperanto years ago. In fact, I have that old book Teach Yourself Esperanto on my bookshelf. I always thought it was too much like Spanish and Italian to appeal much to people from other linguistic groups.
Anyway, I'd rather spend the limited amounts of free time I have learning a real language.
Esperanto helping with Japanese - captainporridge - 2014-12-10
john555 Wrote:I looked at Esperanto years ago. In fact, I have that old book Teach Yourself Esperanto on my bookshelf. I always thought it was too much like Spanish and Italian to appeal much to people from other linguistic groups.Yeah, it looks like a Romance language and functions like
Anyway, I'd rather spend the limited amounts of free time I have learning a real language.
I know how you feel, because I learnt Faroese and I always hit myself going "Why didn't I learn a real language?! Goddammit". Same with Swedish, you can't even find videogames in it so it's like what's the point. If only I had spent all those years with Faroese/Swedish learning Japanese instead, seriously I regret it all the time ;_; Sigh!! Well, you can't turn back time. Although for me, Esperanto only took a few months so I don't regret it unlike the others (Five years of my life with those other ones!!).
—————————————————————————
Will edit this section whenever I find more:
List of misc. Esperanto clubs in Japan (clipping the names a bit since it's not necessary to repeat "Japan" all the time):
Buddhist Esperanto League
Magic Association (not a joke)
Youth Association
Peace-Defense Esperanto Association
Kansai League (encompasses Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, and headquarters in Toyonaka)
Local individual ones: (copied these names without looking so some are esperantified or improperly romanized):
Tsurugashima, Hokkaido, Yamagata, Suginami, Fukagawa, Toyonaka, Kobe, Nerima, Ehim, Mijazaki, Yaugatake, Oomoto, Okayama (at a girl's school), Kyoto, Fukuoka (Sue), Harima, Gunma, Touhoku, Yokohama, Tokyo, Ashiya, Kyushu, Tomakomai, Numazu
Konzoghi Temple: http://www.eonet.ne.jp/~kanakura/bonvenon.html
University ones (not sure if these are the same as the town ones):
Tokyo University, Hokkaido Uni, Gunma Uni, Kyoto Uni
Esperanto helping with Japanese - aldebrn - 2014-12-10
Thanks for posting this op, it's really fascinating. Re-reading Sam Alexander's blog post about using Esperanto as a gateway langauge makes me really want to hit that:
Quote:Suddenly, I was set free of all that, and I could shift my mind into “Esperanto Mode”, as though I was a native speaker. And I can’t explain how happy that made me. You just have to experience it for yourself. You could experience it with “Japanese Mode” or “Russian Mode”, but it would take years of difficult study. Zamenhof’s artificial tongue will put your mind “in orbit” very quickly, because it’s such a logical, regular, easy language.2000 root words would be a snap to learn with the power of SRS technology over a few months, plus the agglutination rules, according to op and Alexander, shouldn't take more than a few weeks. Why? Because it's cool and will help learn other things. Plus I'm a sucker for language invention (thanks Tolkien).
Esperanto helping with Japanese - buonaparte - 2014-12-10
john555 Wrote:Anyway, I'd rather spend the limited amounts of free time I have learning a real language.Biaise Cendrars comes to mind: 'aussi imbécile que l'espéranto.'
Anyway, any language can help with any other language.
Read a grammar of Korean and that'll definitely be déjà vu.
And so on and on and on.
Esperanto helping with Japanese - captainporridge - 2014-12-10
aldebrn Wrote:Thanks for posting this op, it's really fascinating....No problem, what I hate the most is when people go "omg x is great" or "don't do x" and not explain /why/. If you tell a kid not to stand on the rocking horse but don't explain why, he's going to do it anyway and then hurt himself, you know? Same with radicals. A lot of people are put off learning radicals simply because they don't really know what they are and no one has explained them properly. A lot of people memorize kanji individually and not within words instead, for similar reasons.
2000 root words would be a snap to learn with the power of SRS technology over a few months, plus the agglutination rules, according to op and Alexander, shouldn't take more than a few weeks...
To be honest you don't have to learn all the words via SRS either. I started that way and quit rather soon because the vocabulary is so small, once you get over the initial difficulty and learn the most common ones, a lot of the rest come via context or you just learn them as you look them up. After a while it goes surprisingly fast because, for example, you don't have to memorize "this is an adjective, this is a verb" because every word can turn into any other wordform. So you only have to memorize the root of the word and then grammar overall ("when to use verbs").
I will say that the lessons you use can affect how fast you learn. A lot of new Esperanto textbooks are bad (just like a lot of the modern Japanese textbooks are bad). They draw things out, so they take 20 pages to teach what you could learn in 1 page, etc. They're also just plain bad at explaining. It's really annoying. But some of the older ones are actually really good and you can get them for free on places like the openlibrary or that one big archive site with the wayback machine. Those mostly stick to grammar explanations and sometimes some reading exercises, which is all you need.
(I'm also writing an Esperanto textbook.... it's a work in progress and very messy and bad right now, but I'll link in case any readers are interested - even unfinished mine is better than some other lessons out there, sadly. http://hvitumavar.blog.se/esperanto-grammar/ )
Esperanto helping with Japanese - yogert909 - 2014-12-10
Yes, please. And any other recommendations to what are the best esperanto learning resources. Your post has inspired me to learn esperanto if only because I can learn a language in 2 months?! At the very least it would be payback for the past 2 years (and counting) I've spent on Japanese and if it makes other languages easier even better.
Esperanto helping with Japanese - buonaparte - 2014-12-10
I have no idea about d-Esperanto, and don't want to (God forbid!), but this woman knows quite a bit about languages and d-Esperanto in particular:
http://learnlangs.com/esperanto/resources
Esperanto helping with Japanese - captainporridge - 2014-12-10
(Sorry, buonaparte, I don't know what the d in d-Esperanto is...? is it supposed to be like d-ro and mean "doctor" or? does it stand for "dumb" or what? lol)
A word of warning. Only the old dictionaries actually use all standard words. All the new ones, and that includes the Esperanto-Esperanto only ones (meaning, all the three free dictionaries you're likely going to be using online) sometimes use words that are not "real". As in, the creator of the dictionary decided they like this word or decided they wanted to make the common meaning of it seem like the uncommon one, to suit their tastes. It's really scummy but that's how it is.
So I try to stick to an older dictionary like this whenever possible until I learn how to recognize the "fake" words, or learn how to simplify my vocabulary so I don't need the new ones in the first place:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16967/16967-h/16967-h.htm#atentu
Otherwise, here is an online EN-EO-EN dictionary that I use when I can't find a word in the other one and can't think of how to make it myself:
http://www.denisowski.org/Esperanto/espdic_readme.htm
Here is an Esperanto-Japanese dictionary from 2012 in .epub format, which means if you use the right e-reader you can search the text for either the Japanese or Esperanto terms. I found it on "openlibrary.org" (I just downloaded it from there and made a mirror link), they also have two other JP-EO dictionaries there from earlier times:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/8uqb6d995jxsr89
Here is an online Japanese-Esperanto dictionary:
http://www.vastalto.com/pejv/?kvorto=%E6%A9%9F%E9%96%A2&sercxu=%E6%A4%9C%E7%B4%A2&area=yakugo&opt=anta&kugiri=jes&ken=1
Select 見出し語 for "I'm searching in Esperanto" and 訳語 for "I'm searching in Japanese". You can view 10-100 entries per page at a time. It's very handy to use a dictionary like this (that's not in English I mean) because sometimes the English meanings are too vague etc. Quick example, "self" in English is either "mem (he likes it, himself)" or "sin (he hits himself)" and often both get translated to "self" with zero usage definition, but in some other languages like Swedish, Esperanto, etc. you have to know the difference, and this also helps to define the meaning in Japanese.
if you use memrise, you can try my course here which is prefixes and suffixes along with some example words. it needs to be fixed up but you can certainly learn a lot from it. the hardest part in the beginning is recognizing when it's a prefix/suffix and when it's the root of the word and so on (same as when you look at Japanese in the beginning, and see a mass of hiragana and don't know what is what).
http://www.memrise.com/course/333531/all-prefixes-suffixes-examples/
Duolingo is also making an Esperanto course so if you're a big fan of them you can learn there relatively soon. Seems like it'll be done in a couple months.
Two good older textbooks are these (i don't remember exactly HOW good, but they're good enough for me to have remembered about them...):
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8177/8177-h/8177-h.htm
"A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians"
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7787/7787-h/7787-h.htm
"A complete grammar of esperanto" - though this one at least can be rather confusing to just jump into, it goes through many details and mistakes that an English native is likely to make etc
Audio is very easy to find. Search for "Muzaiko" and click on "aŭskultu!" (listen!)", it's one of the net radio stations, usually the music is awful but they tend to play recorded conversations or speeches in-between every few songs which is good listening practise. And you can just search for random Esperanto stuff on youtube (ex. type in "Esperanto Japanio" and see what you get - the "io" is an unofficial suffix, i assume coming from "nacio - nation", that people use to mean "country" even though we have other ways to say that...).
in general i would say try reading what i have on my blog, and then browse through one of these other lessons. a lot of the grammar you can simply learn through context, ex. it took me a while to realize how adverbs worked exactly hahaha. you really don't need to study super closely from books, they're just there if you want to:
http://hvitumavar.blog.se/esperanto-grammar/
Of course I can practise with you (and anyone else in the future who may be reading this) and teach in PMs on this site or somewhere else (LJ? Skype text chat?) but that kind of continuation should be kept out of this thread for obvious reasons.
if you want to use japanese to learn esperanto, there are some textbooks and online sites, though i have no idea how good they are... wikipedia seems pretty bad for it (i checked there when gathering examples for this thread).
Of course, how fast you learn is up to you. You can study it constantly and learn incredibly fast. Or you can be like me and use it all day for two days, but then go two weeks without using it. (though I started using it more, the more I got better at it.)
For general reading practise... There's a few sites with a collection (100+) of PDFs for download of books in various subjects, for example translations the creator did himself, and Buddhist texts and so on. If you like the Moomins, a Swede translated them to Esperanto on an old site and you can use the Wayback Machine to read them all. You can also just go search around and find people's blogs and things. "Bonulo (Good person)" on Twitter is a Japanese person who also tweets in Esperanto so you can go stalk them lol. As far as I know, three videogames have been fan-translated to Esperanto but they all seem to be for the SNES.
Esperanto helping with Japanese - anotherjohn - 2014-12-10
I must confess that my initial reaction to Captainporridge's OP was negative, as I found the 'Esperanto helps you learn these extremely simple aspects of Japanese' argument rather unconvincing.
The idea of treating language as an engineering problem intrigues me, but I've never bothered to look further into Esperanto before now because for some reason I was under the impression that it had some fundamental design flaws, which would bug me intolerably were I to attempt to learn it. The OP piqued my interest so I looked into the matter & it seems that the flaws are more a matter of taste than anything fundamental.
Having read through the Lernu introduction the similarity with Japanese that struck me was the pronunciation, in that each letter is always pronounced the same way, much like Japanese (ん notwithstanding), and if I'm not mistaken the Esperanto 'L' is the same as the Japanese flapped 'R'.
While reading Esperanto it felt like the experience of mentally overriding the English pronunciation when reading romaji helped somewhat. It seems possible that the effect could work the other way too.
I see that there are a fair number of Esperanto decks on Ankiweb. Reckon I'll give the top-rated one a go this weekend and see how it goes. Looks like the vocab is so easy that 90%+ will be learnable in one hit. It seems that as an English speaker I already know ~90% of Esperanto, so going the extra 10% for an L3 seems like a freebie.
Tagline: how fast can you learn Esperanto?
Esperanto helping with Japanese - john555 - 2014-12-10
I honestly don't see the point of studying Esperanto...educate me please.
Esperanto helping with Japanese - jahnke - 2014-12-10
aldebrn Wrote:2000 root words would be a snap to learn with the power of SRS technology over a few months, plus the agglutination rules, according to op and Alexander, shouldn't take more than a few weeks. Why? Because it's cool and will help learn other things. Plus I'm a sucker for language invention (thanks Tolkien).For Esperanto, 2000 root words are too much to learn by SRS. If you learn the first 500 you already know enough to understand a good Esperanto podcast like Radio Verda or a beginner book like Gerda Malaperis. Then you can just learn by context. Or, if you are a another crazy Anki user, you can learn the other 1500 root words while you are reading and listening to the language.
For me, learning to listen to Esperanto was very easy. For some weeks I was under the impression that my listening was way better then my reading skills. Very odd.
But I have to be honest. I gave up on Esperanto because it didn't feel like an interesting language. The Esperanto Wikipedia is very incomplete. There are no good movies in Esperanto. I hate almost every Esperanto band. So, it didn't feel like a language that doesn't deserve my time.
I would only starting using this language again if someday I decide on using Pasporta Servo to travel here in South America or Europe.
Esperanto helping with Japanese - ReneSac - 2014-12-11
Not to take the topic off-topic, but I wanted to answer those:
captainporridge Wrote:Yeah, it is mostly trends and the way one uses the language. The 16 rules of grammar given on the Fundamento haven't changed (well, there is the autonomous use of former prefixes and suffixes, but it fits in the rules of the language as a whole). But a couple of words do have changed in an "non-backwards compatible" way. For example, "komputilo" used to mean water/gas meter, but when computers apeared, there was no way to stop people using that word to mean computer, and that is it's current meaning.ReneSac Wrote:Of course, esperanto evolves with it's use....I think this is a little misleading. In Esperanto, both the old ways and the new ways are still correct and proper. So it's still just as correct to learn your grammar style from a book from 1910 as it is from 2010. It's just trends, no grammar rules have actually been changed or officially declared obsolete, and so on. At least, as far as I've heard.
captainporridge Wrote:So, for example, he said that you don't have to use the accusative case if the meaning of the sentence is clear without it due to context.Source for that? For me the phrase "Kial mi vi amas" is as incorrect as 「どうして私君好き？」. People can probably understand you and pick the correct meaning by context, but theorically it could mean either 「どうして私は君が好き？」 or 「どうして私を君が好き？」. Esperanto don't have any default order to determine the subject and direct object, so the acusative is aways necessary, like the particles in japanese. Also, why would you not want to use it sometimes? It will create a bad habit.
Esperanto helping with Japanese - captainporridge - 2014-12-11
anotherjohn Wrote:...as I found the 'Esperanto helps you learn these extremely simple aspects of Japanese' argument rather unconvincing.Well the point was "what can I think of that it helps with" and not "Esperanto is a magic key for Japanese" lol! But yeah... I was actually really shocked. One of the sites I took some example sentences from was made by a Japanese (or linguistics?) teacher who apparently was telling their English-native students "please parse/translate these Japanese sentences" and yet no one could ever do it because the sentence order was different or whatever... And what was the teacher's advice? "Find the 'main sentence' and work backwards, start at です and...".
I'm not that great at Japanese, but so far I haven't had THAT much of a problem. But if they had so many problems in their class I guess for a lot of people it is.
john555 Wrote:I honestly don't see the point of studying Esperanto...educate me please.Read the earlier parts of the thread. In particular, the very first post. That's all it is. People generally talk about it because it helps a lot more with learning ex. German, French or English, there's less benefits for with Japanese (as far as I can guess).
jahnke Wrote:But I have to be honest. I gave up on Esperanto because it didn't feel like an interesting language. The Esperanto Wikipedia is very incomplete...Yeah, the Wiki is awful (but it has more entries in it than the Danish Wiki hahahhah). This is where I'm taking things into my own hands, I'm translating fanfiction, videogames, and instructions for how to make skis to Esperanto LOL. (Seriously.) Well part of the thrill is that I'm not good enough at any other language to be able to just translate anything I want into it without a proofreader. I tried translating some manga too but I'm too bad at Japanese so it takes way too long. But in the future...
By the way, I'll be using the homestay service to stay in Japan in the future heh heh. I don't have any friends there and I'm poor, so...
ReneSac Wrote:Source for that? For me the phrase "Kial mi vi amas" is as incorrect...He said it in that book that's a collection of his replies to people's questions. "Kial mi vi amas" ("Why I you love") Is not at /all/ clear in meaning as to who is loving whom! So of course the accusative is needed there. But for example, "I go to store" is clear because, ignoring magic, the store isn't going to move to you and the only logical meaning is "i'm moving to the store". Anyway, it's not me who says not to have the accusative if the meaning is clear, it's just something that's allowed.
Esperanto helping with Japanese - captainporridge - 2014-12-11
Now by chance I found something interesting on that Japanese person's twitter I linked to before.
木'漏れ'日 = tra'foli'lumo = "through-leaf-light", the light that filters through the trees.
Suddenly I realized, maybe there's some more of these words in Japanese that are often on the "untranslateable to English" lists that I could collect here and see if they can be easily translated into Esperanto... Well, stay tuned, I'll go hunting in a bit. Although it's nothing special and just has to do with word order again basically...
Esperanto helping with Japanese - buonaparte - 2014-12-11
captainporridge Wrote:(Sorry, buonaparte, I don't know what the d in d-Esperanto is...? is it supposed to be like d-ro and mean "doctor" or? does it stand for "dumb" or what? lol)It can mean anything you like, of course.
d-Esperanto is probably for desperate people, as in 'lasciate ogni speranza'.