The author of How to Learn any Language said that the first language you learn as an adult is the hardest, and everything after that is downhill, no matter how unrelated they are.

I can sort of attest to that.  The ways of thinking that I've taken on from learning Japanese have helped me significantly in learning other languages afterwards.  But I think I had to reach a certain level of proficiency in Japanese before that worked.

Perhaps Esperanto can help you a bit in the long run, but as for me, I don't think I could have reconciled myself with starting out learning a constructed language.  I'd always disdained the idea of studying Latin (not a constructed language but certainly a dead one).

Those of you who claim that Esperanto is too Indo-European should perhaps dig a little deeper - it's not always clear whether the statement refers to phonology, vocabulary, syntax, word-building etc. This article by Claude Piron "Esperanto, a western language?" might show things in a new light:
http://www.geocities.com/c_piron/westernlanguage.html
I've spoken Esperanto, and several other western languages, for 57 years. My introduction to Japanese was a long time ago, and brief but intense - most of it now forgottten. It's impossible to say whether Esperanto helped with that or not, but I think it does have a general propedeutic effect for any subsequent language learning, and is confidence-building, as shown in this Esperanto article:
http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propede%C5 … _Esperanto

And JimmySeal's approach of starting off with negative sentiments about certain languages is hardly conducive to good language learning.

And by the way, the annual week-long 92nd World Esperanto Congress just concluded a few weeks ago in Yokohama - it attracted 1900 Esperanto-speakers (the majority Japanese), from 57 different countries. Of course, you read reports about it in the English-language media? Not!

@JimmySeal
I wasn't trying to be bellicose - just to make two points:
1) That Esperanto Wikipedia article was the only source I then had at hand. I have since found this one in English:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeut … _Esperanto
(I could't find it because I was spelling 'propedeutic' ? la am?ricaine, when I should have been searching for 'propaedeutic'). Am I wrong in suspecting that for you Esperanto, and/or non-ethnic languages, seem to be rather like a red rag to a bull? I am a bit shocked at your 'disdain for the idea of studying Latin', I must say! After all, it was the vehicle of western civilization for a long time and forms the core of many w. languages. Ignoti nulla cupido, as Ovid once wrote.

2) The English-language media demonstrate time and again an unwillingness to present basic facts about Esperanto, even the seven points ot the Prague Manifesto:
http://lingvo.org/2/3
I am not aware of a single English-language report concerning that Esperanto World Congress in Yokohama. Did you hear anything of it anywhere? At least Radio China International and Radio Polonia mentioned it often during the week in their daily Esperanto radio programs:
http://www.polskieradio.pl/eo/
http://esperanto.cri.cn/

[This thread came up on my radar, solely because it supposedly concerns Esperanto, and I have learned from years of experience just how much misunderstanding there is about it]

The left hand side of most wikipedia pages has links to versions of the page in other languages.  Your article was no exception.


As Jarvik said, I think there is very little reporting about foreign languages as it is, and why should there be?  So it stands to reason that an invented language with 100,000 speakers wouldn't get a ton of attention.
Should the news outlets make a wide report every time a few thousand people decide to have a conference somewhere in the world?


I think Latin is a fine language for people who want to learn about the ancient world, but for communication it is pretty much useless.  It hearkens back to my high school days when people were taking Latin to fulfill their "foreign language requirement" because it was more fun while the rest of us were learning languages that are spoken by living people.
I have heretofore snubbed my nose at Esperanto because learning it would not enable me to communicate with many people (I don't think I've ever met an Esperanto speaker in person).  Perhaps I will rethink my stance on it now that I've learned that it eases the process of learning foreign languages (I did, after all, learn simpler "useless" programming languages before moving onto harder ones).  But still, I don't see myself learning Esperanto since I already know how to learn foreign languages.

Last edited by JimmySeal (2007 September 08, 1:22 am)

@Jarvik
>Are you suggesting that the media is conspiring to keep esperanto down?

I wouldn't say 'conspiring' perhaps, but English-media people have an obvious personal interest in not letting people know about Esperanto. I believe it's called obscurantism. They seem to have little problem though with articles e.g. about Klingon and Toki Pona, each with (generously!) perhaps a score of fluent speakers, if that, and no wider goal of 'universal bilingualism'.

@JimmySeal
>The left hand side of most wikipedia pages has links to versions of the page in other languages.  Your article was no exception.

So why did you get your knickers in such a twist about an article in Esperanto then?! ;-)

>an invented language
'invented'?! This is exactly the sort of misinformation I was writing about. I'll bet you a pizza you can't find a single 'invented' root in Andr? Cherpillod's "Konciza Etimologia Vortaro", Rotterdam 2003. There are maybe less than a dozen, but an amateur is not likely to be able to find them. The 15081 listed words are all taken from existing ethnic languages.

>there is very little reporting about foreign languages as it is, and why should there be?

And look where lack of FL competence and cultural awareness in largely monolingual Americans has landed the USA in Iraq! Are you aware of the ongoing ACTFL Campaign "Discover Languages"?:
http://www.actfl.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=1
and the upcoming 2008 UN Year of Languages campaign:
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2007/ga10592.doc.htm
to try to rectify this lack? The EC/EU wishes students in all EU countries to be competent in mother tongue + TWO other languages. Do you think this is happening in the UK, or is even a realistic goal?!! And how will this solve the communication problem anyway, even if they all could speak 3 languages?

>Should the news outlets make a wide report every time a few thousand people decide to have a conference somewhere in the world?

No, of course not, However what Esperanto has achieved since 1887, with only grassroots support, and minuscule govt. assistance, and having survived persecutions & exterminations under i.a. both Stalin and Hitler, is in fact quite remarkable. (I presume you know all about such Esperanto-speaking victims?:
http://www.webcom.com/~donh/efaq.html
[2/3 of the way down the page "Have any governments opposed Esperanto?"])
That a language put together by one man, and now spread around the world as a fully functioning reality, with a considerable body of literature to boot, is next to miraculous. And how many other international congresses are you aware of that attract that number of participants from so many countries?

>I think Latin is a fine language for people who want to learn about the ancient world,

And what about the medieval world too? Latin was still used till about 1700-1750, & even later in some countries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Latin
>but for communication it is pretty much useless.

Limited yes, useless no. What about e.g. historical romance linguistics, general cultural background, etymology?

>I don't think I've ever met an Esperanto speaker in person

I wish I had that remarkable ability to tell what language a person speaks just by looking at them. How did you acquire it? Do Esperanto-speakers look somehow recognizably different? Seriously, I don't think I have ever met a speaker of Tlingit, Mongolian, Maori, Quechua, Basque, Armenian, Yoruba, Manx Gaelic etc. etc. but that doesn't make me say that those languages are useless. Communication is not the sole purpose of a language. Besides being a group identifier and excluder of 'others', it can also be used to include everyone (as Esperanto aims to, and as already noted in the Prague Manifesto).

That's enough for now. I don't want to overwhelm you with facts - and I wouldn't mind seeing some supporting evidence for your statements too.

Hi Aircawn:

No, not any longer since grad school. I still have pages and pages of a sort of 'diary' we were required to keep in Japanese (hiragana/katakana + kanji), but I can no longer read what I myself wrote all those many years ago. To paraphase JimmySeal, "I have snubbed my nose at Japanese", because for me personally it has no practical use, but it was fun while it lasted. The effort required is not worth the payoff. Whereas I taught myself Esperanto as a teenager, and was reading Agatha Christie in Esperanto within a few weeks, and had a large collection of exotic stamps from penfriends in Iron Curtain countries - the envy of my schoolmates. I have never been to Japan, but do hear it spoken occasionally in my city, usually by giggling girls on the bus. With the few Japanese I do have contact with, I use Esperanto, usually by email, but occasionally face-to-face. I live close to Chinatown, many of my neighbors are Chinese, but speak Cantonese or Uighur, not Mandarin. On the street below I hear i.a. Tagalog, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Indonesian, Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Farsi and Azeri and others I don't recognize. I can still recognize a handful of kanji characters, but not enough to make sense of anything. I still have my Japanese textbooks, but at my great age memory is becoming a problem. If I could be certain that Japanese would be spoken in Heaven (or Hell?), then maybe I would take it up again. In the meantime, I'm preparing myself to chat there with the initiator of Esperanto, L.L. Zamenhof, his family-members, and all those others slaughtered in Auschwitz for being Esperanto-speakers or possessing books in Esperanto.

@Jarvik7
Thanks for the reaction. Your profile says you are located in Japan, and you know where I am. A Google search has just revealed to me what JLPT means. Why would that be talked about any more than SAT, TESOL, ESL, TEFL, etc. are? The seven points of the one-page Prague Manifesto are something totally different (I cited the url in an earlier post). Are none of these issues worth discussing? How can the media presume to know what I am interested in? And that certainly isn't most of the crap that passes for news in many US papers and on CNN. They publish what THEY are interested in. The better choice by far is the BBC, but even that is not without its faults.

Does the work of NITOBE Inazoo, Esperanto and the League of Nations no longer mean anything in Japan?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inazo_Nitobe
Or Oomoto and Esperanto?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oomoto
That's all I know about Japan and Esperanto, plus this:
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~hel/index-en.htm and the Japana Esperanto-Instituto:
http://www.jei.or.jp/hp/esp.htm

The N. American press has recently been all over Toki Pona and its inventor (that's right, JimmySeal! - inventor!). You are obviously rather isolated from all of this over there. Unfortunately Esperanto has no connection with Hollywood or the entertainment industry (and thank God for that!). But perhaps we need to get Tom Cruise away from Scientology and into Esperanto for a while? William Shatner's fling with Esperanto in the film 'Incubus' was not exactly very helpful to us.

James wrote:

How can the media presume to know what I am interested in? And that certainly isn't most of the crap that passes for news in many US papers and on CNN. They publish what THEY are interested in. The better choice by far is the BBC, but even that is not without its faults.

I agree with that point completely. Al-Jazeera English is also a good, because it gives one a broader perspective on the goings on of the world. What the news you watch focuses on is very important to shaping your view of the world and its peoples. I am under the impression that Al- Jazeera is seen very negatively in the U.S., because I believe George Bush considered bombing their headquarters, but it actually has highly insightful and informative reporting. For instance I saw a report on Al-Jazeera on the state of the busy Japanese working woman, Japan's declining birthrate and the popularity of 'host clubs' yesterday. The general lack of reporting on the holocaust in Sudan in the Western media is also a shame. But I digress... on with the Esperanto discussion.

Last edited by yawfosu88 (2007 September 08, 7:42 pm)

yawfosu88's post just made me think of an internet meme...

Esperanto is _SERIOUS BUSINESS_

Really though, Esperanto will never expand beyond language hobbyists and linguists -  despite what its lofty goals are. Once you realize that, and the fact that most people have no interest in speaking synthetic languages, foreign languages, or even their OWN language properly, you will see that the lack of esperanto coverage in the media is not a conspiracy or plan or whatever you want to call it by the media. It just won't bring any ratings. The media is NOT a public service, it is a money making business.

On the topic of Toki Pona, media coverage must be localized to wherever mankso lives in Canada. While in Japan I continued to follow Canadian news sources online. I have infact been back in Canada for a little over a month (Victoria, and now Edmonton) and I still haven't heard of Toki Pona. I am just curious about how many of the participants in this thread have heard of it outside this forum or other language hobbyist/learning resources.

btw Jimmy: thanks for clarifying my point

Serge asked:
>So what brings you on this forum, pray tell? :-)

Thanks for the great welcome, guys!
I thought I had explained in a footnote to a previous post how and why I came here. I was obviously under the erroneous impression that the thread title "Anyone know Esperanto?" does not mean what it says, but rather more specifically "Does anyone here who is already a member of this select group reviewing the kanji and interested mainly in Japanese, know Esperanto, not that we are really interested in an informed answer, but heh! maybe we can catch one of them and trot out the usual uninformed Esperanto-bashing?" The Swiss/Belgian psychotherapist Piron wrote an article about such 'Psychological Aspects of the World Language Problem & Esperanto' some years ago:
http://ikso.net/pironejo/Psychological_aspects.html 
And how strange that the ever-silent initial poster has not said a word since the intial question!

Having spoken, used and taught Esperanto and Esperanto Studies (and other languages) at several levels and in several countries for over 50 years, I thought I might be able to shed some light here:
http://www.esperantic.org/
But since there is obviously scant interest in factual information, and I have more worthwhile things to do than provide info already easily available to the serious enquirer, I shan't trouble you further. 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.

the board is getting very ugly recently. the tone of this thread is one that adds to it.

whats going on?

Has anyone ever heard the quote "________ is as pointless as arguing on an internet message board"?