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!!
—————————————
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...icles.html
———————————————
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.
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!!
—————————————
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...icles.html
———————————————
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.
Edited: 2015-01-18, 8:24 am
