JimmySeal Wrote:

Quote:I thought I had explained in a footnote to a previous post how and why I came here.

Actually you didn't explain how you came here. I'm quite curious how you found a thread on an obscure message board and made a baffling post on on it a mere 18 hours after it was started.

My thoughts exactly. I have to say that my initial opinion of Esperanto (which I respect for being a successful invention) suffered greatly from the limited contact I've had with its followers.

I respect Esperanto as an intellectual achievement, for being a succesful attempt to create a sustainable language system.

I have now come to dislike its because most of its champions are so religious and missionary about it. Any brief mention of Esperanto on forums is encountered with a flood of lengthy posts with unsolicited information and the rhetoric is surprisingly close to sectarian. For that reason, I twitched when I saw this topic here and - lo and behold! - it has turned out to be exactly as I thought.

mankso Wrote:Please return to your tatami, washi, fude, suzuri & sumi.

This sounds like a good plan. Japanese (and any other natural language) comes with centuries of history and culture and - more importantly - doesn't have the ambition to change the world...

mankso Wrote:I hope it might give some comfort knowing that Hitler, Stalin and their ilk felt similarly about Esperanto.

You can't call something a real argument until somebody gets compared to Hitler.

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I'm as puzzled as yorkii.

Perhaps people got tired of last month's long winded arguments and loose patience?

Have to admit, mankso, who would seem to be very informed on the Esperanto language does nothing to answer the original poster's question, and seems far more interested into the politics of the language, which I agree is outside of the topic of these forums.

That said I wouldn't want to see this forum turn into some kind of walled community.

Looking at Japanese from the viewpoint of other languages, and discussing the workings of other languages could be very interesting. Perhaps adding a sub-forum for such discussions would be a good addition? Or better yet, a general "language learning" sub-forum? The only thing I'm wary of, is to spread out too thin. I think this would hurt the forums in the long run.

Quote:That said I wouldn't want to see this forum turn into some kind of walled community.

I think we gladly welcome people who want to contribute productively to the discussions here. To the best of my knowledge, Resolve is not a student of RTK, but he actively posts here, and I'm sure all the members would be glad to chat even with people who haven't designed kickass SRS programs
But showing up with a belligerent attitude and no interest in Japanese is not a good way of "starting off on the right foot."

And now I present an excerpt from the last two pages of How to Learn any Language

Quote:Every attempt to launch an artificial international language has so far failed. Esperanto, Idiom Neutral, Kosmos, Monoglottica, Universalsprache, Neo-Latine, Vertparl, Mundolingue, Dil, Volapuk, even an international language based on the notes of the musical scale, all started out weak and gradually tapered off. My guess is they always will. You can no more "vote" a language into being the international language than you can vote warmth into a blizzard.
Languages attain prominence something the way individuals and countries do, through all kinds of force, including war. There's an added element in prominence, however. Brute force is not enough. The winning language must have a degree of acceptability to the losers.
Russian emerged from World War II as a mighty language, but it failed to bluster beyond the bounds of the Communist empire. Russian even failed to inspire people to learn it inside their empire. Students in Hungary, Romania, and East Germany knew no more Russian after eight years of schooling than Americans know French after similar exposure.
English, on the other hand, was welcomed. Africans and Asians may not have rejoiced at being forcibly incorporated into the British Empire, but they recognised that the English language, if learned by all, was a unifying tool that enabled different tribes who lived five miles apart to communicate for the first time, in a language brought down upon them from thousands of miles away.
A wolf will lift his neck to let a larger wolf know that he accepts the other's dominant role as leader. The entire world has lifted its neck to acknowledge English as
the language of choice in the modern world. It wasn't all military and commercial power, either. American movies, songs, comic strips, TV series, even T-shirts all helped make English the international language of the earth by acclaim.
But only the shortsighted will consider the dominance of English reason to return foreign language materials to the bookstore and forget the whole thing. It's precisely because the peoples of the world honour our language that we get so much more appreciation when we go out of our way to honour theirs.

Esperanto is a bit of a chicken and the egg problem, a Catch-22. Hardly anybody wants to learn it because not enough people speak it, and not enough people speak it because hardly anybody wants to learn it. And as far as I can see, it will always be that way.

What Jimmy said, and the bizarre people who speak it (see mankso) turn off many who might start looking into learning it. Before this thread I had no opinion on Esperanto, as well as little knowledge of it other than that it is synthetic and it looks like Italian. Exposure to mankso has only left a negative impression and hasn't informed me of anything about the language other than that they are a bunch of paranoids. Here is a hint to the Esperanto missionaries: inform people about the language, not the politics.

I especially enjoyed his final jab at us all as Japanophiles. I'm pretty sure that many of the more active participants on this board are not learning only Japanese, as evidenced by the interest in the Rembering the Hanzi thread, and the many non-native English speakers who are here (which means that they have learned ESL).

I do remember looking into Esperanto, and thinking it was interesting - but realized that I was missing out on a hell of a lot of culture. It's a little bit like learning Python, PHP, or C++ - congratulations, you can talk to a computer. Likewise, you can talk to a person in Esperanto, but there's no real feeling of "wow, this person is actually interested in my culture and is talking to me in my language. That's very nice - odd, but nice - of them".

Esperanto is a different mindset. A cool one, but different, and probably doomed. The way the political winds in the world are blowing, this will never take off unless something revolutionary happens; e.g. the USA explodes. It's an unrealistic, utopian ideal. I mean, it's built into the name: "esperanto - 'hope' ".

And actually, I do remember a program coming on NPR featuring a bunch of Esperantists. I listened because while I am convinced that Esperanto is useless (except maybe as a bridge language to make the concept of new languages easier, I'll allow that), I find it quaint.

The Esperantists in the program made complete asses out of themselves. Of course, they were assisted by the program host, but still. They really came off as fairly self-righteous and closed-minded in their own special way. Not very enticing (sorry, RTK mode).

Speaking of wikipedia references and the Esperantist's final jab at the forum, I think this might be helpful in this situation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_La..._and_usage

nilfisq Wrote:i think that's the best conclusion to extract from this discussion, danieldesu

Does the desu here serve as a copula or something else? Last night on Guild Wars, I saw someone with the name BlahBlahデス. I didn't think anything of it last night, but with danieldesu here, I fear there may be some sort of a pattern.

I agree with dihutenosa on this one: Esperanto's utility as a language to overcome the first second language barrier is probably quite useful, if you feel like going out of your way. However, as an international language, it would take significant political upheaval before it could even remotely accomplish its goal.

And, yes, Godwin's Law is infallible.

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dihutenosa Wow, it's almost comical now that you pointed out Godwin's Law (I learn everyday)

I only have one thing to add...

mankso Wrote:Please return to your tatami, washi, fude, suzuri & sumi. I hope it might give some comfort knowing that Hitler, Stalin and their ilk felt similarly about Esperanto.

You forgot the Wasabi !!!

Yep. Or, for those following at home:

La le?o de Godwin ... estas aforismo pri interretaj diskutforumoj, kiu jenas: La probableco, ke en enreta diskuto aperas komparo kun Hitlero a? la nazioj kun plilongi?ado de la diskuto proksimi?as al 1.*

It is pretty interesting stuff, though. If you feel like blowing a half hour of your time and have any sort of romantic language background at all, you'll suprise yourself at how easy it is to get started. I remember finding some Esperanto intro site that walked you through a few constructions and I was pretty impressed.

*My computer doesn't like entering those accented marks, sorry

Megaqwerty Wrote:

nilfisq Wrote:i think that's the best conclusion to extract from this discussion, danieldesu

Does the desu here serve as a copula or something else? Last night on Guild Wars, I saw someone with the name BlahBlahデス. I didn't think anything of it last night, but with danieldesu here, I fear there may be some sort of a pattern.

My name is Daniel, so my username は danieldesu!
(or if I was telling someone my name, I might say "daniel desu")

As for Esperanto, I remember looking into it when I was looking at various languages (before deciding to study japanese), and thought that it actually took some cues from Japanese. It's been a while since I looked at it, but I vaguely remember it using some sort of particle system to denote various parts of a sentence or something, or maybe words in certain parts of a sentence always ended in a certain way (kinda like particles).

has the offending Esperanto missionary (and generally offensive) mankso been removed from this forum?

@dihutenosa: I too didn't know Godwins Law, thanks for the trivia

I'm genuinely suprised that this is new information to people (no offense)!

Well, from now on whenever you see somebody arguing over serious business ™ on the internets, you can use Godwin's Law.

Or alternatively (and perhaps more relevantly to mankso's ejaculation): Reductio ad Hitlerum.

haha, excellent. Where do you learn this stuff?

@danieldesu: In Esperanto, it is easy to tell what the word is functioning as. For example: cat is kato. If you want it to be a direct object, you put an "n" on the end, making it "katon." Japanese would use the particle を for this function.

猫 - kato
猫を - katon

Perhaps, that is what you are talking about?

PrettyKitty Wrote:Perhaps, that is what you are talking about?

Yes, that is what I was thinking. It was in reference to an earlier post that mentioned that learning Esperanto as a stepping stone to learning Japanese was pretty pointless, because Esperanto was more similar to Western languages. Which reminds that I also read somewhere that in fact Esperanto was more different than it was similar to Western languages, as the creator took points from many different languages when creating it, not just from Western languages. I still resisted spending a year of my life studying it, however.

yorkii - too much time on the internet. if you look at my stories, a good chunk of them are internet memes/fads.

Just found this line in the "Esperanto FAQ"

"For a native English speaker, we may estimate that Esperanto is about five times as easy to learn as Spanish or French, ten times as easy to learn as Russian, twenty times as easy to learn as Arabic or spoken Chinese, and infinitely easier to learn than Japanese."

By that reasoning, Japanese would also be infinitely harder than all those other languages too. Yikes! Never realized I was learning such an impossible language.


Thought this was interesting too:
Learn NOT to speak Esperanto

Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers:
http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november...tions.html

and Table 1.4 on p.21 in
Omaggio, Alice C.: Teaching Language in Context - Proficiency-Oriented Instruction. Boston, MA.: Heinle & Heinle Publ. Inc. 1986.

Yes, I know Japanese is considered one of the more difficult languages for English speakers, but to make a claim like the one I quoted is just a way of begging to not be taken seriously. Japanese is hard, but it's not impossible. And I know that that document isn't the authority on Esperanto learning, but it at least claims to be representative of the Esperanto newsgroup community.

But I'm glad to see that you are sticking to factual information, even if those FAQ creators aren't.

This thread really wasn't started with the intention of bashing Esperanto, but honestly, the more I learn about it, the less I like it.

JimmySeal - to be fair, though, I can't think of another commonly used language that is harder than Japanese to learn for an English speaker. Possibly Arabic, I've never tried...

Still, when someone pulls out a term like "infinite," they should know what they're doing. I think Japanese is (at most) twice as hard as Chinese is for an English speaker (if it's really any harder at all) so it would follow that Esperanto is at most 40 times easier than Japanese. Not infinitely easier.


And as an aside, I think Hungarian and Finnish may very well be significantly harder than Japanese though I've never tried learning either of those myself.

Well, I would think that when people start throwing around terms like "x times harder", then they're treading awful close to pseudolinguistics. Labels like this - especially in the case of the above quote, where they are conveniently grouped in multiples of five - seem totally arbitrary.

It's a nice way to sell to a layperson - and not necessarily entirely dishonest or purposefully misleading. But still, a bit of a turn-off for anyone who's studied any language semi-seriously.

For example, I'd never rank Japanese as 20 times harder than Chinese, or Chinese as 20 times harder than Spanish.

But again, we risk judging the true value of the language by the nuts who support it. And as we all know, there are plenty of students of the Japanese language who are utterly insane. It'd be a pity to see someone say "wow, these people are totally batshitinsane. Japanese sounded cool, but all these animefreaks/videogamenerds/pervs/etc are a total turnoff."

All good points.

I actually know someone who was turned off studying Japanese because of other people's motivations for it. Truly not a good reason, as you point out.

Re 'infinitely easier' - I agree this is a rather careless and exaggerated assertion, meant to be understand very loosely, not literally.
Re 'five times easier than French or Spanish' - I would even go so far as to claim from personal classroom experience that this should be more like 'ten' times easier, i.e. one can reach the same level in 1/10th of the time <I>ceteris paribus</I>. However, there really are too many subjective variables to make such categorical claims, and it might be better to talk about the usual four skills separately.

>the more I learn about it, the less I like it.
<I>De gustibus non est disputandum</I>. But I find it rather hard to understand how one can have such strong objections to something with which one has claimed to have little or no personal knowledge. All my comments come after a lifetime of practical Esperanto-speaking contacts in many countries - the language obviously works as is, so all theoretical discussion is in vain. I have tried to stick to facts, not suppositions. And is it not remotely possible that I could have, if not firsthand, then at least secondhand knowledge of Hitlerian and Stalinist repression of Esperanto and Esperanto-speakers, which obviously colors my so-called "missionary and generally offensive" statements? The title of Ulrich Lins' book "Die gef?hrliche Sprache" was indeed aptly chosen. By the way, I have met not a few nuts studying other languages also, Japanese included - I'm not denying we have our share as well.

I cannot support 'one ethnic language (i.e. English) for the world' because of its implication of linguistic, economic and cultural neo-colonialism, and the actual destruction caused to other minor language and cultures (vide e.g. N. American indigenous languages). The only alternative, as I see it, is to work for a common, non-ethnic, non-territorial, second language. It is unlikely that any major nation-state will support this, since only the smaller ones would have anything to gain here with the introduction of a 'buffer-language'.
[This is not intended to be offensive to anyone].

ADMIN: I'm just clearing duplicate post! Thanks.