Anyone who has ever studied any linguisitics can tell you this: no language is harder than any other language. The native speakers don't have any problems speaking it.

What is the problem is that Chinese and Japanese are sufficiently different from the western languages we are familiar with to make it challenging for US. And really, once you get past the hanzi/kanji, Chinese and Japanese aren't that difficult for a westerner at all - smaller vocabularies, more regular grammar (than English at least), etc.

The 5x 10x 20x harder etc stuff is total bs. By what method did they calculate that? They just pulled a number out of a hat.

>Anyone who has ever studied any linguisitics can tell you this: no language is harder than any other language. The native speakers don't have any problems speaking it.

A brilliant observation! Does one really need to study linguistics to learn this? I thought we were now discussing 'Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers' (note the last three words). The FSI, being also a place for teaching FLs, has no need to 'pull numbers out of a hat' when they have the personnel and test results right in front of them. The approximate number of hours to reach a certain level was clearly stated. It is relatively easy to come up with such numbers e.g.: no. of contact/class hrs + no. of hrs homework per contact hr x no. of weeks per semester. A similar standardized set of achievement levels is now being implemented in EU countries:
Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (CEFR). Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2001.

>Chinese and Japanese aren't that difficult for a westerner at all - smaller vocabularies, more regular grammar (than English at least), etc.
Apart from the tones, the unfamiliar phonology, the writing systems, (the politeness levels for Japanese), the widely divergent cultural norms, and the fact that while learning vocabulary one has absolutely no etymological crutch to grasp at. (Yes, I know there are some loan words). And a silly question: In which European language is one likely to find the need to have a website anything remotely like 'Reviewing the kanji'?

mansko Wrote:>>the more I learn about it, the less I like it.
De gustibus non est disputandum. 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.

You're right, it's not really a question of workability, since we know that people are successfully using the language, but one could argue that a language designed for simplicity should actually be simple and worry-free wherever it can be. One such area where it fails this test is the redundant and unnecessary use of case and number agreement with adjectives. Why's that there? The article I cited earlier makes many other valid points to this effect.

But mostly it comes down to a matter of taste, as you said in Latin. 十人十色 as we say here.
One thing that quickly caught my eye was the writing system. Esperanto has five consonants with circumflexes and one vowel with a breve accent. The consonants occur in no other language in the world, and it seems the U breve occurs in one other alphabet: Belarusian Latin. I know that personal computers weren't around in the time when this language was conceived, but movable print had been around for several centuries. Was Zamenhof so self-important that he thought printers should start retrofitting their systems to accommodate his new letters? Over time, languages have been trying to shed their accents, not take on new ones. Greek underwent a large overhaul to that effect. In some languages, (e.g. Spanish) accents serve the function of indicating word stress, but in Esperanto they are merely a gimmick employed to unnecessarily avoid digraphs.
Naturally this has caused problems throughout the last century so people have conceived two+ solutions, each with their own problems and unpleasant appearances. Three+ writing conventions all jumbled together, what a mess! Not exactly the simplicity Esperantists are touting.
My English-International keyboard layout allows me to type all the accents for Spanish, Italian, French, German, Portuguese, and a plethora of others, but not Esperanto, and that makes me loath to start using the language. A language for the 20th century should have had a way to cope without accents from the beginning, not invent new ones.

There are a couple things to note with your reply:

-Can the smartass attitude, it's getting you nowhere.
-Get it through your mind that the world isn't against Esperanto, most people just don't care about it as much as you obviously do. Personally I have no opinion on it; although I do have a rather poor impression of its missionaries (that means you). Maybe that makes me "Worse than Hitler"™.
-Not everyone here is a native English speaker, or even a native speaker of a western language.
-Just because someone made a study doesn't make it relevant. There are many studies conducted with poor methodology. Number of class hours required to learn a language is unmeasurable considering the variety of teaching methods, materials, interest level/dedication of students, etc. You also need to consider that a classroom is FAR from the best place to learn a language - making "class hours required to learn a language" a poor determinant of "language difficulty". Furthermore, classes generally do not bring a speaker to native level fluency. What was the study's definition of "learned the language"? Ability to order a pizza by telephone? Sure the obstacle of kanji (for a speaker of a language that doesn't use Chinese characters) might make for a slower start, but once they are learned, vocabulary absorption would likely be faster. There is also my previous point about having relatively regular grammar and a small vocabulary (mostly made of compounds).
-Japanese phonology is rather familiar to an English speaker. The differences are no more major than with romance languages for example.
-Learning the kana takes only a few hours (at least, that's all it took for me), after which they are unforgettable due to heavy use (unless you are using romaji for some reason), as for the remaining part of the writing system, see the next point.
-I said "once you get past the kanji" in my post, rendering your last sentence moot. Anyways, with the proper methodology you can learn to recognize and write the kanji within a few months, after which vocabulary becomes much easier to learn than in <insert roman alphabet using language> where you cannot see the building blocks of the word (aside from loan words which have made their way into english)

The closest thing to a valid point you have is cultural differences, which I will group with politeness levels. English also has politeness levels, although they are not as strictly defined as in Japanese. I'll leave that up to you to decide if that makes it easier or harder. As for other cultural differences, I think there are many differences between a person from a western Canadian major city, and someone from the Italian countryside for example. Cultural differences are more a problem for living in a country - not speaking its language, in my opinion.



"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."

Let us assume that Esperanto takes 5 years to learn. Spanish and French will therefore take 25 years to learn, Russian 50, Arabic or spoken Chinese (MEANING NO HANZI) will take 100 years to learn, and Japanese is unlearn-able. Sorry but that paragraph is pure BS. Unless you want to reduce the time required to learn Esperanto to a number of months, those numbers make no sense.

Quote: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 during the last 50 years).

Here you are making the fallacious argument that English carries a culture (which one?) with it. Of course this is true to some small extent, but I think it's far more arguable that it's the other way around, but really it's neither. Western culture is spreading around the world not because of English but simply because western culture is spreading around the world, be it as a result of militant activity or (more commonly) through pop culture.
As for English destroying other languages, yes it is encroaching on other languages, but that has nothing to do with English being an ethnic language. The simple explanation is that a lot of people don't want to keep track of more than one language in their head, and a lot will lean toward the one that will enable them to communicate with the most people, especially if it is widely recognized in their local area.
If Esperanto were to actually take root, it would be doing the same type of "destruction."

As for Esperanto's neutrality, I ask that you respond to the following:

Quote:English is considered an unacceptably partisan choice as International Auxiliary Language because it's closely associated with (if not original to) the USA, while Esperanto is considered neutral because it isn't a "national language" (that is, the principal language of a nation-state), it's the language of a harmonious and open community. That sounds sensible enough until you compare it to other world-wide standards such as S.I. units, which became international by becoming "national" for more than one nation; the "neutrality" Esperantists value so highly (just like its small-town friendliness) is the mark of a failure. After all, if the EEC had adopted Esperanto as its lingua franca in the 70s, Belgium would by now be full of eurocrats claiming it as their native language; wouldn't that make Esperanto just as politically unacceptable as English for an Asian interlinguist?

Besides, Kurdish isn't a "national language" either, but that wouldn't make it a politically neutral choice as a global auxlang. Nations aren't the relevant question; what matters is the power-balance between existing speakers and new learners, and that's mostly dependent on how the learners are organised. There are obvious reasons why IALists might be wary of adopting the tongue of the current coca-colonial superpower, but that isn't the only option - here in the UK we have our own independent standard dialect, and India and Ireland have versions with quite different geopolitical associations. None of these countries maintain Language Academies full of Grammar Police, and even if they did you'd be at liberty to set up a new standard dialect of your own.

(Please note: using English to point out the holes in Esperantist propaganda is not the same thing as advocating World English - if I knew all my readers spoke Spanish, I'd choose different examples...)

How would it be possible for a global social-engineering project like Esperantism to be politically neutral, anyway? Stalin and Hitler didn't think it was; they saw international communication as a dangerous thing and interlang organisations as conspiracies of dissent. What, you disagree with the policies of Stalin and/or Hitler? Fine, but that means you're abandoning any claim to political neutrality...

As a further illustration, consider one of the irregularities in Esperanto's word-building system. The names of nations such as Austria or Belgium are formed from the word for an inhabitant, using the <-ujo> "container for" suffix:

* <Austr-ujo> "Austria" from <austro> "an Austrian",
* <Belg-ujo> "Belgium" from <belgo> "a Belgian".

But most countries outside Europe are handled the other way round, using the <-ano> "member of" suffix:

* <Australio> "Australia" gives <australi-ano> "an Australian"
* <Tunizio> "Tunisia" gives <tunizi-ano> "a Tunisian".

The situation is obscured by rampant irregularity - e.g. <Svislando> is inhabited by <svisoj>, whereas <Irlando> is inhabited by <irlandanoj>; and to top it all off <-ujo> is normally replaced by <-io> in modern Esperanto. But ignoring all that: why the big split between countries like Austria and countries like Australia? Wouldn't a single system have worked everywhere, so that Austrians are (say) <austrianoj>? Zamenhof's insistence on going the long way round shows the influence of the political worldview in which races are elementary units and nation-states are natural homelands for single ethnic groups (each with its own unique culture and language) - a doctrine that was all the rage in pre-WW1 Eastern Europe, or indeed apartheid-era South Africa.

Jimmy: sounds like Esperanto is Worse Than Hitler™

mankso -

Briefly put, I agree.

I do remember reading somewhere that Hitler thought of Esperanto as some bizarre Jewish plot for world domination. Don't doubt that for a second. The notion of a decentralized, "neutral" (however problematic that concept may prove to be) language is not going to be appealing to any major nation-state.

One ethnic language as lingua franca does tend to seriously ruin quite a few things. The air of cultural superiority is also a major factor.

But unfortunately, people tend to be - in varying degrees depending on factors such as nation and personal disposition - pretty nationalistic. Japan is obviously not an exception to this rule. Most people aren't terribly interested in investing hours of their time just to learn what people that don't look like them have to say. In the US, that's what "fair and balanced" Fox News is for - they tell us.

But then again - aren't there an awful lot of Esperantists in Japan?

Esperanto seems like it could have been awesome, say, in Africa instead of KiSwahili. Or China, or any number of other areas where there are just so many mutually unintelligible languages within a few miles of each other.

In regards to nuts in a language - I'd go as far to say that I've never seen so many, uh, bad representatives in a language studying community as I've seen in Japanese. Luckily this forum seems all but devoid of that segment (RTK's probably a bit too hard for casual anime nerds), but it's enough so that I'm pretty wary of signing up for a Japanese class outside of Japan or even really telling people that I study Japanese. If someone sees me with flashcards, I tell them it's Chinese (which is technically true, since I also do Mandarin..)

How long would you say it takes to become conversational in Esperanto?

[This is in reply to JimmySeal's message of 6:37 pm]
There are far too many points for me to respond to here adequately - I'm having difficulty keeping up with all this. To begin, someone might wish to add this to the new thread on language propedeutics:
Fantini, Alvino E. & Timothy G. Reagan: Esperanto & Education - Toward a Research Agenda. ESF, 1992.
http://www.esperantic.org/esf/f-r1.htm

Re redundancy - the first sentence reads "In the study of language, redundancy is considered a vital feature of language.":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundancy_(language)
your proposal seems to be to put all the syntactic weight on just one word or letter. Surely too great a load if one little item is somehow misheard?

Justin B. Rye's article - there is no date or indication if or when this has been updated. I read it several years ago, and found the then current version excessively picky, and seemed to betray his preference for a more Interlingua-like language. The fact remains that Esperanto works just fine as it is, and no amount of grammatical tinkering is going to persuade any more people to use it. Zamenhof only produced the skeleton of the current version in 1887 after many trial-runs. Since then the basic grammar has remained unchanged, some latencies have been exploited, and the vocabulary has grown (some would say excessively). In fact, reform proposals of various committees usually turn out to be mutually exclusive - this is what caused the Ido split.

Re the writing sysytem - the principle followed was 'one letter - one sound'. It really doesn't matter a fig what shape the diacritic has, as long as it distiguishes in some way the basic letter. I remember being particularly shocked when I got my first computer to discover that what I had been able to do for years since about 1950 on my Swiss manual Hermes typewriter, I was no longer able to do on a computer 40 years later, viz. put accents on a any letter I chose to. Surely a gigantic design failure of a presumably linguistically naive English-speaker? This is not in actual fact a great problem. It has always been allowed to write 'h' after a consonant in place of the diacritic over the letter. Computer geeks have preferred to write 'x' instead of 'h', which to me makes the language look supremely ugly and surreal. It takes a few seconds more to write 'chirkauajho' with Unicode UTF-8: ?irka?a?o, or ISO Latin1, but can you read it? [I have three times lost everything I typed till here trying to do this in this window!]

>Over time, languages have been trying to shed their accents, not take on new ones.
That is certainly not true of Vietnamese! The only example I can think of is the Greek one you mentioned, and possibly Russian in 1917/18 (?).
>in Esperanto they are merely a gimmick employed to unnecessarily avoid digraphs.
Not so - it contravenes the stated principle of a phonemic (not phonetic) writing system (LLZ was ahead of his time - phonemes hadn't been discovered in 1887). Would you prefer the Polish spelling system of multiple digraphs? (That's possibly what he was trying to avoid).

[This is in response to Jarvik7's message of 6:42 pm]
>-Not everyone here is a native English speaker, or even a native speaker of a western language.
How can I possibly know this? I'm new here. Most of the profiles give no relevant information. I have not visited any other thread in this forum than this, and probably won't. (Have no fear! I have other fish to fry). Google alerted me to the topic - that's why I came here. My impression so far is that this a rather closed elitist group, not especially open to outsiders, especially one who is no longer interested in "reviewing the kanji". Sometimes I think some of you may be ESL/EFL teachers in Japan, other times I think there may be several USA 15-year olds in here, judging by some of the comments (and that's all I have to go on). It also seems that comments can be made too quickly and snippily without the person ever having read any of the preceding messages, or consulted any of the cited materials. That doesn't help an informed discussion. Criticism is dished out freely, but not accepted so readily.

>Number of class hours required to learn a language is unmeasurable considering the variety of teaching methods, materials, interest level/dedication of students, etc.

Not at FSI, it's not - and that's where the figures came from. It's all pretty standardized. Re the wider world - yes your comments make sense. (This seems to be an example of not reading anything about FSI, yet commenting on it - no offense intended!)

>-Japanese phonology is rather familiar to an English speaker. The differences are no more major than with romance languages for example.
So is it the manner of articulation then? The lip, teeth, tongue movements seem totally alien to me. Last week I had to ask a Japanese ESL-student waitress in a Middle Eastern restaurant here to repeat 'hot sauce?' FOUR times, before I understood what she was asking me. It was embarrassing for both of us (and I have years of experience dealing with non-English speakers - I just hadn't realized how atrocious her English was!).

Surely if one is learning Japanese in Japan, one would be concentrating more on listening and speaking than on writing? I can understand acquiring a passive acquaintance with maybe up to 500 basic kanji, but why is an active knowledge of kanji necessary or even useful? Not to pass notes to people, surely?!

Re the x-times for language learning - I commented elsewhere on that ridiculous 'infinitely' harder. It does call the rest 'estimates', which you seem to want to overlook. I think that that was not written for a specialist audience, but any experienced FL teacher should be able to at least group the more commonly taught languages into 4 classes from easiest (1) to hardest (4). Esperanto would fall into a fifth Group 0. It has a place as a diagnostic tool for predicting aptitude for subsequent FL learning.

"My impression so far is that this a rather closed elitist group, not especially open to outsiders"

Mate, I think you need to take a cold shower and have a good lie down. This site is intended for people using a method of learning kanji developed by James Heisig. Members do stray onto other topics from time to time - and there is, as yet, no conspiracy to exclude discussion of Esperanto. If you do feel the need to post here, be aware that comparing people to Hitler is not the best way to establish your credibility.
I'm sure that one day a discussion on the merits or otherwise of Klingon will pop up, causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the opposing camps. But all that will be completely secondary to the purpose of this forum.

I, too, am too tired to continue the Esperanto discussions right now so I'll address some simpler matters:

Quote:My impression so far is that this a rather closed elitist group, not especially open to outsiders, especially one who is no longer interested in "reviewing the kanji".

I don't think this place is as closed-off as you think, but you showed up with what came across as a belligerent and accusatory tone, laced with sarcasm, which is bad form for an unfamiliar, first time poster on practically any internet forum. I appreciate you being a good sport today.

Quote:So is it the manner of articulation then? The lip, teeth, tongue movements seem totally alien to me.

Yes, the manner of articulation is fairly different but an English speaker can pronounce Japanese quite convincingly if they can manage to pronounce a flap (which sounds a lot like a Spanish R). Of course the reverse is not true, and that's the source of your trouble with the waitress and the reason they're willing to pay me a full salary to stand in a classroom and pronounce things. (Incidentally, the same goes for Japanese students of Esperanto; I suspect many of your conversation partners had probably already tackled the phonology of English first).

Quote:Surely if one is learning Japanese in Japan, one would be concentrating more on listening and speaking than on writing? I can understand acquiring a passive acquaintance with maybe up to 500 basic kanji, but why is an active knowledge of kanji necessary or even useful? Not to pass notes to people, surely?!

Any serious student of a language should want to be able to read the language in addition to speaking and hearing it. I'm not sure how much time you've spent here, but grocery store items are not all too English-friendly, and the same goes for construction signs and the like, though it is possible to be illiterate and get by here.
But to answer your question more directly, the methods espoused on this site have been shown to equip learners with an active knowledge of 2000 kanji faster and with less effort than the typical learner would expend in learning to half-adequately read 500 through traditional methods.

@naniwa
>If you do feel the need to post here, be aware that comparing people to Hitler is not the best way to establish your credibility.

You have taken the remark out of context and appear not to have read the short article cited earlier "Have any governments opposed Esperanto?":
http://www.webcom.com/~donh/efaq.html
or to know about the recent 546p. historical study by Ulrich Lins "The dangerous language" (available in German and Esperanto, but not yet, I think in English).
Hitler took the time to specifically mention Esperanto is his book "Mein Kampf", and
both he and Stalin, among others, actively opposed both the language and its speakers.
Is a language with such opponents not perhaps something worth looking into, or is one not, albeit perhaps unknowingly, aligning oneself with them in opposing it so vehemently? This was the context and allusion in which Adolf Hitler aka Schicklgruber was mentioned.

I have a feeling Naniwa knows about the historical footnote. But comparing one's debate opponent to Hitler, or the third reich, or [insert really bad thing here], is a common tactic, and is nothing more than a cheap shot and a demonstration that the person using it has no better argument to stand on; it matters not that Hitler had an actual historical encounter with the language. It's still an invocation of Godwin's law.

Quote:Is a language with such opponents not perhaps something worth looking into, or is one not,

I'd say that more than anything Hitler was a paranoid psychotic who convinced most of Germany (and probably himself) that Jews were responsible for Germany's sad state after WWI and that they were conspiring to generally make things bad for everybody but themselves. It stands to reason that he would think they might subvert him with some common language. That doesn't mean it was necessarily a potential secret weapon against the agents of evil.

Quote:albeit perhaps unknowingly aligning oneself with them in opposing it so vehemently

If anything, the skeptics among us dislike it for nothing more than the threat it poses to waste the time of ourselves and others in chasing a pipe dream, but you insultingly place us with madmen if you think we fear people are going to use it to take over the world or something.
We may also dislike it for stylistic reasons, or its well-cited inherent sexism, but this again is entirely different from the Nazis.

mankso Wrote:or is one not, albeit perhaps unknowingly, aligning oneself with them in opposing it so vehemently?

I hope Hitler didn't hate mustard on his sandwiches, I too may be aligning with him if so.

well put cracky. /bow

this thread is getting ridiculous like ol' Christine's thread. /rolls eyes

I dunno about mustard but it is widely believed that Hitler was a vegetarian. So if one of your friends starts giving you reasons not to eat meat, you have the perfect comeback:

"Is a meat-eating diet, with such an opponent, not perhaps something worth looking into, or is one not, albeit perhaps unknowingly, aligning oneself with him in opposing it so vehemently?"

Frankly mansko, when you bring out arguments like that, it makes it very hard to listen to anything else you have to say.

i actually "lol"ed at that Jimmy. thanks

mankso Wrote:>Number of class hours required to learn a language is unmeasurable considering the variety of teaching methods, materials, interest level/dedication of students, etc.

Not at FSI, it's not - and that's where the figures came from. It's all pretty standardized. Re the wider world - yes your comments make sense. (This seems to be an example of not reading anything about FSI, yet commenting on it - no offense intended!)

Since your other points have already been responded to, I'll just talk about this one. I admit to not doing any reading a FSI. However, reading about it is not required to make the point I did. It doesn't matter if their language instruction is all pretty standardized. Assuming that their teaching methods and materials are equally effective for all the languages they teach, that says nothing of other teaching methods elsewhere. In effect that study shows ONLY the effectiveness of the teaching methods they use.

Even if you admit that the "Japanese is unlearnable" bit is nonsense, that changes nothing. The numbers themselves are also nonsense. For example, how is spoken Chinese (ignoring the "difficult" hanzi) 100x more difficult than Esperanto? I understand the point that the paragraph is trying to get across, but it needs to state it in more relevist terms (as in, Esperanto may be easier for native speakers of WESTERN languages due to similar vocabulary or grammatical concepts) and not throw random numbers around.

[ファブリス]

Quote:"Is a meat-eating diet, with such an opponent, not perhaps something worth looking into, or is one not, albeit perhaps unknowingly, aligning oneself with him in opposing it so vehemently?"

I've seen this logic used often in "conspiracy" circles, for example about the silence surrounding UFO's in the media. The logic is not always used incorrectly, but is often flawed like in this good example above. I'm sure there must be a name for it, like in the case of "Godwin's law", because I've seen it many times.

@Jarvik - the number for Chinese is 20x, but I essentially agree. I know someone who was functionally proficient in Chinese (spoken only) within 4 years, so it would follow that someone could reach the same level of Esperanto in 2.4 months? A bit hard to swallow.

Jimmy Seal Wrote:English is considered an unacceptably partisan choice as International Auxiliary Language because it's closely associated with (if not original to) the USA

English is from England. It is as closely associated with the USA as it is with Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Scotland, Ireland, Jamaica, Ghana, Nigeria, and other former colonies of the British Empire.
English is not American.

jimmyseal Wrote:To the best of my knowledge, Resolve is not a student of RTK

For what it's worth, I did the first 500 kanji with RTK about a year and a half ago. I
didn't know about this site at the time nor the concept of an SRS and I found
it difficult to retain the material I'd learnt. I ended up giving up.

I'd like to return to it one day, mainly to improve my writing ability.
Unfortunately as I can already read about 65% of the jouyou kanji, the choices
of many of the keywords grate on me, but that's not a new complaint. And the
design is one of the most effective ways to learn how to write the kanji, I
think.

So, not studying RTK at the moment, but have in the past, and might in the future
:-)

yawfosu88 Wrote:

Jimmy Seal Wrote:English is considered an unacceptably partisan choice as International Auxiliary Language because it's closely associated with (if not original to) the USA

English is from England. It is as closely associated with the USA as it is with Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Scotland, Ireland, Jamaica, Ghana, Nigeria, and other former colonies of the British Empire.
English is not American.

Thanks, Captain Obvious. Didn't care to enlighten us all a bit more by telling us that water is wet?

lol.lmao. take a chill pill. My point is that English is not an unacceptably partisan choice as International Auxiliary Language because it's closely associated with the USA as it associated with England and the entire commonwealth(i.e. approx 50 countries). If someone believes English is partisan it should not be for such a reason.
God bless you and have a nice day.

That's exactly the author's point and he mentions everything you just said (he's from England, btw). Did you read the whole excerpt or just the first sentence?

One could still make the claim that English is western-biased as it's predominantly spoken by westerners or descendants of westerners, and the question is whether that's a problem or not. I think it isn't.