Thread: Learning a second language

Esperanto was a marvelous idea, and deserved to take off once the United Nations got under way, and yet it is practically dead nowadays. Maybe that is because nobody loves it as his own, and I'm sure few people, even among Esperanto speakers, ever got into the habit of thinking directly in it. Look at the way Shakespeare, the Bible, Churchill, Billy Connolly and a host of other sources creep into our daily words. I don't believe that would happen with Esperanto.

Idiomatic shades of meaning are usually specific to languages. "I'm sure" often means you aren't sure, and "no doubt" can mean there is no doubt, in England, but in Scotland means "I'm not at all sure of that." In Arabic "helas", literally "it is finished", can mean "All is complete", "Don't mention it", or "The situation has deteriorated beyond remedy". Probably that would came into Esperanto if a lot of people used it routinely for a few centuries, but we aren't going to.

I had a friend who worked in Hong Kong in the 1960s, when the level of refugees arriving from the mainland was high. He used to see Chinese taking out notebooks and discussing how to spell words, when they didn't understand each other, because the script spans a number of dialects. Similarity can even be seen in some of the Japanese traditional characters.

There is a marvelous story about Japanese script, because they realised that military signalling in morse was a non-starter with their traditional script. So they produced a new phonetic alphabet, with characters similar in number to our own. But in wartime it promoted laxity in ciphering, for they relied on the fact that a Japanese-speaking British, Inidian or American signaller was unlikely to be within range of their tactical communications. What they didn't realise, when they sent out encrypted groups of Japanese characters, is that with only two or three morse dots and dashes per letter, they were sending random groups of English letters without knowing it. Any signaller could take those down, and relay them to the specialist decryption unit in Ceylon.

My sensei told me that in Japanese as well as Chinese, people speaking different dialects (or unsure about pronunciation) would draw the kanji with their fingers. Pronunciation may differ, but the kanji are unambiguous.

i am fluent in spanish with english being my first language...


IF you are serious about trying to learn a language then you really should give a try to "michel thomas master languages"...

michel thomas has a incredible past if you read his wiki..... incredible man... he taught a group of school children to be conversant in french in 5 days....... 5 days.....

his teaching method is very different from pimmsleur and rosetta stone *(which sucks IMHO)... it is simple and effective....

give it a shot... you will not regret it...

Originally Posted by Caledonian

Esperanto was a marvelous idea, and deserved to take off once the United Nations got under way, and yet it is practically dead nowadays. Maybe that is because nobody loves it as his own, and I'm sure few people, even among Esperanto speakers, ever got into the habit of thinking directly in it. Look at the way Shakespeare, the Bible, Churchill, Billy Connolly and a host of other sources creep into our daily words. I don't believe that would happen with Esperanto.

This is why Latin was considered the language of science. It's dead language, not subject to cultural amalgamations.

My only problem with Esperanto is that it's not truly a 'neutral' language. It's very Western European in structure, and those who already speak a Romantic language would have the easiest time learning it. Its presumptions are Eurocentric.

I'm a bilingual in Finnish and Swedish and doing more or less ok in Estonian (more) and German (could be better) too. The point is that if you want to learn a second language then you should be able to use it frequently or you will forget it, at least some of it. Using another language is the best way to keep it going.

Originally Posted by ChesterCopperpot

This is why Latin was considered the language of science. It's dead language, not subject to cultural amalgamations.

Latin is so related to many modern languages, say Spanish and Italian, and many anglosaxian languages has words that come directly from Latin. Back in my school days (so damn long ago) we had to study (write, read, speak) Latin for eight years. Now i'm sorry that i never understood to start studying Spanish or Italian shortly after that because it might have been relatively easy. I was only happy that my Latin days were over for good.

Originally Posted by ChesterCopperpot

This is why Latin was considered the language of science. It's dead language, not subject to cultural amalgamations.

My only problem with Esperanto is that it's not truly a 'neutral' language. It's very Western European in structure, and those who already speak a Romantic language would have the easiest time learning it. Its presumptions are Eurocentric.

Originally Posted by ChesterCopperpot

This is why Latin was considered the language of science. It's dead language, not subject to cultural amalgamations.

That, and in the early Western civilization, it was the unifying language, like English nowdays.
Everything that used to be published then was often done in Latin because everyone who mattered could read it. That is why all doctors have to learn the Latin names for all human bones etc.

My only problem with Esperanto is that it's not truly a 'neutral' language. It's very Western European in structure, and those who already speak a Romantic language would have the easiest time learning it. Its presumptions are Eurocentric.

To a point you are right. However, if you want to design a language that is easy to learn (especially the character set) the arabic alphabet is much easier to build something with than the oriental ones. And you definitely want to leave out the tonal component, as well as the ambiguity of Japanese pronunciations.