Esperanto is finding new life online(theverge.com)
theverge.com
Esperanto is finding new life online
http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/29/8672371/learn-esperanto-language-duolingo-app-origin-history
10 comments
Ĉu vi legis libron "Marvirinstrato"? Mi posedas ĝin ekde liberigo, sed mia Esperanto ŝajnas esti tro baza eternale :-(
http://www.amazon.com/Marvirinstrato-Originalaj-noveloj-Espe...
http://www.amazon.com/Marvirinstrato-Originalaj-noveloj-Espe...
Ne, bedaŭrinde mi ne tre familiaras kun la esperantliteraturo. Ĝi ŝajnas interese, tamen!
Se vi volas pli facile legeblaj libroj, mi rekomendas Faktoj kaj Fantazioj de Marjorie Boulton. Ĝi ne estas tro malfacila, sed tre amuziga!
Se vi volas pli facile legeblaj libroj, mi rekomendas Faktoj kaj Fantazioj de Marjorie Boulton. Ĝi ne estas tro malfacila, sed tre amuziga!
Speaking of constructed languages, you might find Lojban interesting. It is "a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic." I have read most of the official language description. It's a compelling book not just about Lojban, but about logic and English grammar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
http://mw.lojban.org/papri/the_Complete_Lojban_Language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
http://mw.lojban.org/papri/the_Complete_Lojban_Language
There is a reason why human languages evolved to have syntactic ambiguity: better throughput. Psycholinguistic research is obsessed with syntactic ambiguities (and there are good reasons for that) but in real life these ambiguities are pretty much always resolved by other sources of information: context, prosody, world-knowledge, social cues. If you disambiguate a language on the syntaxtic level you're basically just adding excessive redundancy. There are special niches where disambiguating information is scarce or where any misinterpretation could have catastophic consequences (e.g., aviation handbooks) but outside these domains the absence of syntactic ambiguity is hardly a desirable property.
I don't think that syntactic ambiguity is particularly crucial to throughput. There is still plenty of semantic ambiguity possible in Lojban, and from what I have seen Lojban doesn't seem to have particularly lower throughput than natural languages.
International diplomacy?
There you can always ask for clarification. I'm not aware of any war that has been started because of a syntactic ambiguity. But when your plane is about to crash or when your nuclear reactor is threatening to melt down, you may not be able to get a clarification.
For anyone interested in learning a little more about Esperanto, Duolingo just put their Esperanto course into public beta and there's a good amount of learning content already: https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto-Online.
There's also http://lernu.net, probably the most well-known source of Esperanto news, lessons and other stuff.
Amuziĝu!
There's also http://lernu.net, probably the most well-known source of Esperanto news, lessons and other stuff.
Amuziĝu!
Came here to share the good news about Esperanto on Duolingo, too!
Duolingo is fantastic and I am addicted to keeping my streak alive. However, I find the lack of variety and relative rigidity of the sentences to be offputting over time. I've nearly completed two trees, and have been a pretty consistent user over the past 3 years, so sometimes the monotony of the sentences drags me down. I have to imagine that we (collectively) are very close to having a sentence generator that can throw together a pertinent and sensical verb phrase and noun phrase that differs just slightly from the curated/created sentences, at least for the Indo-European languages.
Duolingo is fantastic and I am addicted to keeping my streak alive. However, I find the lack of variety and relative rigidity of the sentences to be offputting over time. I've nearly completed two trees, and have been a pretty consistent user over the past 3 years, so sometimes the monotony of the sentences drags me down. I have to imagine that we (collectively) are very close to having a sentence generator that can throw together a pertinent and sensical verb phrase and noun phrase that differs just slightly from the curated/created sentences, at least for the Indo-European languages.
All languages have a culture associated to them. It's hard to dissociate the culture from the language. Even English, which is used in different cultures, has local optimizations when it is used daily.
Latin is bound to an ancient culture (and a religious one).
Even Klingon and Quenya are bound to the universes and cultures created by their authors & fan bases.
But I don't see any culture associated with Esperanto. I'm wondering if things might be different if its proponents started associating with a niche culture (be it business) and then expand out to encompass things from everyday life. I don't know what the answer is…
Latin is bound to an ancient culture (and a religious one).
Even Klingon and Quenya are bound to the universes and cultures created by their authors & fan bases.
But I don't see any culture associated with Esperanto. I'm wondering if things might be different if its proponents started associating with a niche culture (be it business) and then expand out to encompass things from everyday life. I don't know what the answer is…
There is a very distinctive culture to Esperanto: people who continue to hope for positive social transformation and international and intercultural harmony.
Esperantist and conlanger William Annis (on the Conlangery podcast) said something to the effect that, if you go to a Esperanto congress, you should start with the default assumption that everyone you meet is a gay vegetarian. [1]
I cannot speak to the truth of this myself ;)
[1] http://conlangery.com/2011/12/05/94/
Esperantist and conlanger William Annis (on the Conlangery podcast) said something to the effect that, if you go to a Esperanto congress, you should start with the default assumption that everyone you meet is a gay vegetarian. [1]
I cannot speak to the truth of this myself ;)
[1] http://conlangery.com/2011/12/05/94/
That sounds more like a philosophy than a culture.
There is even an Esperantist movement that explicitly argues that it's a culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raumism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raumism
I'm working on a conlang called 7erb (pronounced Verb).
It's a language of only seven (7) words in its entire vocabulary. Here's what I got so far:
- All seven words in the vocabulary are a negative. A word means "everything but that word. Words are then "stacked" to be more "anti-specific"
- 7erb is completely present-tense. Past and future are not acknowledged
- Anything in this world that can be evaluated in various ways depending upon arbitrary conditions are generally avoided in 7erb. 7erb is a language of reality, not subjectivity and opinion. There are no words in 7erb that function as adjectives
- However, vocal pitch and tonality can indicate degrees of closeness, height, intensity etc. In written form, this can be expressed with bold text, underscoring etc
If anyone is interested in developing this new language, please contact me (see my profile).
It's a language of only seven (7) words in its entire vocabulary. Here's what I got so far:
- All seven words in the vocabulary are a negative. A word means "everything but that word. Words are then "stacked" to be more "anti-specific"
- 7erb is completely present-tense. Past and future are not acknowledged
- Anything in this world that can be evaluated in various ways depending upon arbitrary conditions are generally avoided in 7erb. 7erb is a language of reality, not subjectivity and opinion. There are no words in 7erb that function as adjectives
- However, vocal pitch and tonality can indicate degrees of closeness, height, intensity etc. In written form, this can be expressed with bold text, underscoring etc
If anyone is interested in developing this new language, please contact me (see my profile).
I've always thought Esperanto to be an incredibly bad idea. http://xkcd.com/927/?cmpid=pscau
Esperanto has some incredibly good aspects to it, though. The biggest, of course, is that learning Esperanto (which is very easy to do) helps tremendously with learning other languages. So it doesn't really matter if you think Esperanto is an incredibly bad idea, Esperanto is an incredibly good idea if you're looking to learn other languages afterwards. It's not just another standard. It's a great learning aid.
"A group of European secondary school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a control group, who studied French for all four years."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Third-language_acquis...
"A group of European secondary school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a control group, who studied French for all four years."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Third-language_acquis...
Interesting. Naturally, that only gives me more questions. Is the effect limited to French? For instance, is it also a good for learning Chinese? Is the effect stronger of weaker than learning a romance language for the same amount of time before learning French? This[1] cite from Wikipedia seems to hint so. I'm not sure how trustworthy it is. But even then, it raises the question of how much of the effect depends on having better motivated teachers.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040301110515/http://www.educati...
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040301110515/http://www.educati...
Logically Esperanto would give you a bigger boost in European languages, since it's a European based language. However, if the innovation is in teaching methods, you might also see a boost in other languages as well, though I wouldn't expect nearly as much.
Well, this is for esperanto being a conlang that is borrowing mostly from romance, slavic and germanic languages and indo-european languages in general. I have been studying italian for about 6 months, and I can comprehend written french and portuguese, and written/spoken spanish to an extent, all of which are romance languages i.e. latin descendants. And I have not really studied these languages. So esperanto is no special case here, it is not the magical special key to learn all the other languages.
You're right, it's easier to learn a third language than it is a second. But Esperanto is super easy to learn in the first place, it gets you to learning your third language that much quicker.
By that argument, any good idea is a incredibly bad idea when people attempt to copy or improve it. And that's not the road you want to go down...
It is not the same case. Esperanto was one of the first attempts. Now that we have Esperanto, Intelingua, Ido, Novial, and many others I have not even hear about, trying again with a new international language would be a good reason to post this comic. But when Esperanto was developed, a simple artificial language was a very innovative idea. Although it was not very successful, I think it was worth a try.
Unlike you, I see Esperanto as a remarkable success story. It has survived wars and revolutions and economic crises and continues to attract people to learn and speak it. Esperanto works. I’ve used it in about seventeen countries over recent years. I recommend it to anyone, as a way of making friendly local contacts in other countries.
It depends how you define success. It is indeed a remarkable achievement to have survived this long and have a (growing? I think so) speaker community, and I could agree it is worth learning. But the goal was not to just work, or have a small community of speakers. It aimed to become a world-wide known language for international communication. In this sense, it would need to have an importance of the order English has today to be considered a success, so I think that "not very successful" is even a bit too generous.
Not really. Surely the real problem is that learning Esperanto means you can now talk to people who, well, are the kind of people who learnt Esperanto...
I'm surprised no one has made a here-is-the-right-xkcd-comic-for-this-situation bot.
This is the perfect post for a more in depth argumentation. Otherwise there is not much discussion value here, only disturbance.
It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto.
If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto.
Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pretty awesome, though.
If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto.
Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pretty awesome, though.
Languages are not just languages. They're also a component of a wider culture. Foreign language education exposes students to cultures and ways of thinking not present in their day to day culture and allows them to understand and possibly communicate with people around them who speak that language (living in central Texas, you ought to know a bit of Spanish).
I took 5 years of French, 3 years of Latin. I enjoyed them up until the last ~75% or so of my senior year when I was really sick of the whole high school business. I don't think the Latin had outside utility of any sort until the 2nd or 3rd year simply because I didn't have the vocabulary (and I, like the vast majority of people, was unaware of spaced repetition and hated non-spaced repetition flashcards). The study of French and Roman culture and history was more interesting (and also fun when done in the respective languages) but due to the lack of slow history (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/09/slow-hi...) in modern education I'd say its utility was limited. That utility I got from Latin the language was mainly in deciphering a few words (or contemplating a deeper meaning behind them) instead of reaching for Google's "define:word" -- but my vocabulary has lapsed and I don't care to refresh it. The other form of utility was minor because I had already studied French for two years, and that utility is contemplation of different grammatical forms and how language is structured, which can improve communication skills. I had a great English grammar class in 8th grade, and that was basically it for serious study of English grammar, but learning French allowed me to reflect more on language grammar in general so when Latin came along it was just another thing to reflect on rather than starting the reflection itself, very marginal utility.
But these utilities really don't justify the classes and resources on their own... If we want high school to produce the greatest amount of utilons, we should be explicit about that, but then many many things will need to change. I believe English should be the world language, there's no practical reason to teach anything else at the expense of other more practical things to teach (like programming), especially in English speaking countries. If we want high school to more approximate what Universities used to represent, such as encouraging more Intellectualism (which I don't think is all that great, at least society-wide, from a utility perspective...), we should be explicit about that too, and again things will change. You might want to have students study French, Greek, Latin, Lojban, etc. for at least 2 years each because of Intellectualism -- but you may also want to balance that with more modern things like deeper computer science or math or physics, which won't help most people in their future lives either but can at least be fun and intellectually interesting for people who want their Intellectualism a certain way. Or we can try for a mix, but I'd propose that our current system is a mix, and other mixes will inevitably resemble the current system by being one-size-fits-all and not work too well. So if we want both, separate. Bring back trade schools and let young teenagers wholly uninterested in purely intellectual pursuits get to doing more interesting things like building a house or building JavaEE applications, and let the intellectuals do their thing without constantly having to waste time and energy rationalizing some vague utility and relevance to their proof-carrying code research.
But these utilities really don't justify the classes and resources on their own... If we want high school to produce the greatest amount of utilons, we should be explicit about that, but then many many things will need to change. I believe English should be the world language, there's no practical reason to teach anything else at the expense of other more practical things to teach (like programming), especially in English speaking countries. If we want high school to more approximate what Universities used to represent, such as encouraging more Intellectualism (which I don't think is all that great, at least society-wide, from a utility perspective...), we should be explicit about that too, and again things will change. You might want to have students study French, Greek, Latin, Lojban, etc. for at least 2 years each because of Intellectualism -- but you may also want to balance that with more modern things like deeper computer science or math or physics, which won't help most people in their future lives either but can at least be fun and intellectually interesting for people who want their Intellectualism a certain way. Or we can try for a mix, but I'd propose that our current system is a mix, and other mixes will inevitably resemble the current system by being one-size-fits-all and not work too well. So if we want both, separate. Bring back trade schools and let young teenagers wholly uninterested in purely intellectual pursuits get to doing more interesting things like building a house or building JavaEE applications, and let the intellectuals do their thing without constantly having to waste time and energy rationalizing some vague utility and relevance to their proof-carrying code research.
There are lots of things more immediately valuable than badly-learned languages. But languages learned well seem to measurably improve a person's cognitive performance. IT improves memory, creativity, staves off mental aging, &c.
http://panglott.blogspot.com/2011/06/bilingualism-brain-heal...
"You live a new life for every new language you speak.
If you know only one language, you live only once."
-- Czech proverb
Dead languages like Latin and Old Greek don't add lives. You don't even speak them.
More seriously: I'm all for offering Latin, Greek, and even Esperanto but why would you give up teaching modern foreign languages? Why do you think they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto?
Dead languages like Latin and Old Greek don't add lives. You don't even speak them.
More seriously: I'm all for offering Latin, Greek, and even Esperanto but why would you give up teaching modern foreign languages? Why do you think they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto?
I'll be more bold than panglott... we can't "give up" teaching modern foreign languages, because we already don't teach modern foreign languages.
I took four years of high school French, and got decent grades. I recently started reviewing and learning more through flashcards in Anki. On the one hand, the fours years of "study" put enough French in my head that I'm making progress this way... on the other hand, as I continue making what is frankly a great deal more progress with the spaced-repitition than I ever made in school I still can't help but notice I still can not fluently read much of anything, let alone speak or hear it.
Now, as it is common on the Internet to confuse saying something is true with advocating for that fact, let me say that A: I still think learning a language is a good idea, I just don't think what we have now can actually be called "learning a language" and B: if we were ever allowed to change The Holy Curriculum [1], there's probably more effective ways to teach a foreign language. I can't help but notice that my Anki-based studies are wildly more effective than what I tried to do in school. (They're also still inadequate on their own so far. No contradiction there... my schooling was even more inadequate, you see.) Four years of a properly-researched and developed language program, with proper software support, might have produced someone at least capable of using the language at the end.
[1]: A phrase I am settling in on to indicate my contempt for the idea that we need to deeply reform education, but we must do so under the constraint that nobody is ever allowed to remove, add, reorder, or change anything we do, ever.
I took four years of high school French, and got decent grades. I recently started reviewing and learning more through flashcards in Anki. On the one hand, the fours years of "study" put enough French in my head that I'm making progress this way... on the other hand, as I continue making what is frankly a great deal more progress with the spaced-repitition than I ever made in school I still can't help but notice I still can not fluently read much of anything, let alone speak or hear it.
Now, as it is common on the Internet to confuse saying something is true with advocating for that fact, let me say that A: I still think learning a language is a good idea, I just don't think what we have now can actually be called "learning a language" and B: if we were ever allowed to change The Holy Curriculum [1], there's probably more effective ways to teach a foreign language. I can't help but notice that my Anki-based studies are wildly more effective than what I tried to do in school. (They're also still inadequate on their own so far. No contradiction there... my schooling was even more inadequate, you see.) Four years of a properly-researched and developed language program, with proper software support, might have produced someone at least capable of using the language at the end.
[1]: A phrase I am settling in on to indicate my contempt for the idea that we need to deeply reform education, but we must do so under the constraint that nobody is ever allowed to remove, add, reorder, or change anything we do, ever.
Language study is tough in high school. A better case can be made for teaching languages as early as possible (pre-K, K-6). My nephew's Catholic school is teaching him Spanish[1] in pre-K and will continue until 8th grade. I took Dakota (not to be confused with Lakota) in high school. I couldn't really speak it then or now[2], but it did stick with me[3], but I see the children who learned it in K-6 did much better.
1) My parents and I recently took my 5 year old nephew with us on vacation to DC. He tends to sing at that age. We were in an elevator and he started in on a song and a couple from Spain started asking me questions about it. I really could only say he was being taught Spanish at his school.
2) I just cannot do a guttural with my voice. It sounds like I'm coughing. I have such a low voice anyway that it sounds wrong all the way around. At least I learned from a male instructor, that's a bit important as the sexes speak differently in Dakota. My old boss, a female, learned to speak from her uncles and her aunts thought she "spoke like a man".
3) I still do server names in Dakota. wanca is my #1 server.
1) My parents and I recently took my 5 year old nephew with us on vacation to DC. He tends to sing at that age. We were in an elevator and he started in on a song and a couple from Spain started asking me questions about it. I really could only say he was being taught Spanish at his school.
2) I just cannot do a guttural with my voice. It sounds like I'm coughing. I have such a low voice anyway that it sounds wrong all the way around. At least I learned from a male instructor, that's a bit important as the sexes speak differently in Dakota. My old boss, a female, learned to speak from her uncles and her aunts thought she "spoke like a man".
3) I still do server names in Dakota. wanca is my #1 server.
Pretty awesome, that you learned some Dakota! At least it gives you something to work with, if you wanted to expose your kids/nephew to it. Bilingualism from childhood is a really powerful and amazing gift to a child, and really it doesn't matter what the languages are: a heritage language is as good as a major national language.
The dual-language immersion programs are really awesome; I've seen kids from monolingual English families learn to do all their math work in Spanish by the end of kindergarten. Teaching kids language in that way is so much more effective, I hope those programs only become more popular.
The dual-language immersion programs are really awesome; I've seen kids from monolingual English families learn to do all their math work in Spanish by the end of kindergarten. Teaching kids language in that way is so much more effective, I hope those programs only become more popular.
The key premise is that one year of mandatory classroom teaching isn't actually going to get someone speaking proficiently, unless perhaps it's something like Esperanto.
They won't be speaking Latin either, but at least some written knowledge of Latin will be useful. The basic paradigm of classroom language education started when Latin was commonly taught... and since it focused on teaching passive, literary use of the language (rather than active, oral use), that was entirely appropriate.
But superficial, passive, literary understanding of modern national languages doesn't help anyone much more than it would of Latin.
They won't be speaking Latin either, but at least some written knowledge of Latin will be useful. The basic paradigm of classroom language education started when Latin was commonly taught... and since it focused on teaching passive, literary use of the language (rather than active, oral use), that was entirely appropriate.
But superficial, passive, literary understanding of modern national languages doesn't help anyone much more than it would of Latin.
Sure, but the point is that a superficial literary understanding of Spanish is a stepping stone towards plonking yourself in a Spanish-speaking country and realising just how much Spanish you don't know, not to mention a substantial step towards being able to read a vast and growing quantity of Spanish-only written material.
A superficial literary understanding of Latin gives you middle class bragging rights and a substantial step towards being able to parse the original text of a literature which has been exhaustively translated into English, complete with notes on shades of meaning. (And an even more limited grasp of some of the fundamentals of Spanish, I suppose) And since the source material is all ancient texts, you can't even pep the teaching up with some relevant and modern material or motivate the students by the prospect they can use it to backpack in Peru or do language exchange in Madrid.
I'm not persuaded that the inadequacy of languages teaching is an argument for the same time to be devoted to devoted to something which is even further removed from being useful and the teacher is even less likely to be adequately equipped to teach.
A superficial literary understanding of Latin gives you middle class bragging rights and a substantial step towards being able to parse the original text of a literature which has been exhaustively translated into English, complete with notes on shades of meaning. (And an even more limited grasp of some of the fundamentals of Spanish, I suppose) And since the source material is all ancient texts, you can't even pep the teaching up with some relevant and modern material or motivate the students by the prospect they can use it to backpack in Peru or do language exchange in Madrid.
I'm not persuaded that the inadequacy of languages teaching is an argument for the same time to be devoted to devoted to something which is even further removed from being useful and the teacher is even less likely to be adequately equipped to teach.
These days we have good models for how to teach bilingualism to kids: dual-language immersion schools, in which both languages are used extensively in coursework. The problem is that this labor-intensive model will be impractical outside metropolitan areas with school choice, or communities with a strong heritage language community.
Latin may not be a living language, but it remains very widely used in scientific terminology, law, religion, and elsewhere. Like the prestigious national languages, it is a mark of erudition and social status; the demonstration of which is itself a purpose of education.
Latin may not be a living language, but it remains very widely used in scientific terminology, law, religion, and elsewhere. Like the prestigious national languages, it is a mark of erudition and social status; the demonstration of which is itself a purpose of education.
As someone who knows the Polish language: I agree with you. With the Esperanto part, at least. Latin's very mentally stimulating, but more useless than a modern language, so I wouldn't quite agree with learning it.
I think we have some strange ideas about how and why studying languages are "useful". Most Americans are monolingual English speakers, and almost by definition can't study a language that's more "useful" than English.
There are large cognitive benefits to bi- and multilingualism, but for these it doesn't actually matter what language you speak: a heritage or minority language is as good as anything else.
But the classroom model of the United States isn't actually designed to make people multilingual; if anything, it's the opposite. The default language policy of the United States is mostly to shift people to English monolingualism, no matter their circumstances, heritage, or language rights.
There are large cognitive benefits to bi- and multilingualism, but for these it doesn't actually matter what language you speak: a heritage or minority language is as good as anything else.
But the classroom model of the United States isn't actually designed to make people multilingual; if anything, it's the opposite. The default language policy of the United States is mostly to shift people to English monolingualism, no matter their circumstances, heritage, or language rights.
The point is that many students continue learning that language past that one year. It's much better to give students practical skills in a living language.
There's research showing that one year of Esperanto followed by three of French leads to greater French fluency than four years of French: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto
Those studies included tutelage in the structure of language as part of their Esperanto instruction, so the same benefit might exist simply by modifying students' language curricula.
What percentage of American high-school students who take their mandatory year of foreign language continue on to speak that language proficiently and competently? What "practical skills"?
The supposed economic value from learning modern national languages is wildly overstated, for English monolinguals. It's better to learn languages because learning languages is valuable for its own sake, and pick the language you learn simply because you like it.
There is a huge disconnect between our implicit goals for language learning in this country and the effort we expend upon it.
I strongly believe in the value of language education, but given the amount of time and money we're willing to spend on it, we'd get as much or more benefit from making them study Latin.
With Latin, all the people who want to learn a Romance language would get a leg up on it, and all the people who want to study biology would get a leg up on that, and people who are fine with just speaking English will get more insight into their own language.
The supposed economic value from learning modern national languages is wildly overstated, for English monolinguals. It's better to learn languages because learning languages is valuable for its own sake, and pick the language you learn simply because you like it.
There is a huge disconnect between our implicit goals for language learning in this country and the effort we expend upon it.
I strongly believe in the value of language education, but given the amount of time and money we're willing to spend on it, we'd get as much or more benefit from making them study Latin.
With Latin, all the people who want to learn a Romance language would get a leg up on it, and all the people who want to study biology would get a leg up on that, and people who are fine with just speaking English will get more insight into their own language.
Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition.
What's wildly overstated is the benefit learning Latin has on anything other than taking the SAT. Studying French is much more beneficial to speaking French than studying Latin and I shouldn't have to explain why that is the case.
What's wildly overstated is the benefit learning Latin has on anything other than taking the SAT. Studying French is much more beneficial to speaking French than studying Latin and I shouldn't have to explain why that is the case.
The mandatory minumum year of foreign language is already outside the "critical period hypothesis" anyway.
If you buy the critical period hypothesis anyway, which I do not.
If you buy the critical period hypothesis anyway, which I do not.
The thing is, in this country in the last decade or two, we've seen the rise of dual-language immersion schools that are actually effective at teaching bilingualism. These are mostly English-Spanish, but there are French immersion schools in Louisiana, and indigenous language schools for Cherokee, Hawaiian, &c. This method of language education actually seems to produce children who are bilingual in both languages; they are a major advance in language education in the United States, and they should be wholeheartedly supported.
The "mandatory one year of foreign language in high school" is a relic of decades past when Latin and Greek were widely taught, and that is what they are mostly what they are suited for. It is just as much a relic as Latin is.
The "mandatory one year of foreign language in high school" is a relic of decades past when Latin and Greek were widely taught, and that is what they are mostly what they are suited for. It is just as much a relic as Latin is.
Another popular bilingual immersion option is English-Mandarin. I know people here in San Francisco who have kids doing bilingual Mandarin immersion, apparently with good results. I love Latin and Latin teaching, support its availability, and think it's benefited me and other students who were given the opportunity to learn Latin, but I think you're right that the recent modern-language immersion trend is incredibly valuable and deserving of support. We should want language teaching to be effective and beneficial for students.
There's nothing on the scale of full-time immersion, nor is there likely to be, but there's now a small minority of Latin teachers who are presenting Latin as a spoken language, including using Latin as the language of instruction and attempting to apply modern language pedagogical techniques like Total Physical Response. So even some Latin teachers might agree with your criticism of the less-holistic teaching styles and the distance they put between students and the language.
Edit: I didn't notice that you were also advocating teaching Latin further up in the thread.
There's nothing on the scale of full-time immersion, nor is there likely to be, but there's now a small minority of Latin teachers who are presenting Latin as a spoken language, including using Latin as the language of instruction and attempting to apply modern language pedagogical techniques like Total Physical Response. So even some Latin teachers might agree with your criticism of the less-holistic teaching styles and the distance they put between students and the language.
Edit: I didn't notice that you were also advocating teaching Latin further up in the thread.
>Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition.
Let's be honest here - nothing of value is lost.
The opportunity costs of even one year of any non-English language for American HS students makes it simply not worth it.
Let's be honest here - nothing of value is lost.
The opportunity costs of even one year of any non-English language for American HS students makes it simply not worth it.
> should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto
Why teach Latin, Greek, or Esperanto badly? How does that help?
And if you can solve the "badly" problem, why not teach something that can be used day-to-day?
Why teach Latin, Greek, or Esperanto badly? How does that help?
And if you can solve the "badly" problem, why not teach something that can be used day-to-day?
That most Americans do not have occasion to speak a language other than English day to day is exactly the reason most of them will not learn another language.
The "badly" problem is actually a really huge one.
The "badly" problem is actually a really huge one.
Why? I have basic french and german and it was usefull many times.
I'm honestly surprised to learn that anyone defends learning Latin outside of academic scholarship. I guess I feel the same about Greek but no one learns that in the US so it's less argued about.
I took Latin in high school and felt that I wasted four years I could have spent learning (rudimentary) Spanish, or at least something that had any cultural relevance at all. You have to find a way to make kids care about it as well as justifying its utility.
I see Latin and Greek education as historical relics, akin to how we used to emphasizing testing students' ability to construct shapes with compasses and straightedges, or their ability to memorize bible verses.
I took Latin in high school and felt that I wasted four years I could have spent learning (rudimentary) Spanish, or at least something that had any cultural relevance at all. You have to find a way to make kids care about it as well as justifying its utility.
I see Latin and Greek education as historical relics, akin to how we used to emphasizing testing students' ability to construct shapes with compasses and straightedges, or their ability to memorize bible verses.
> ...something that had any cultural relevance at all.
My high school was heavily focused on Latin and ancient Greek. We spent the first two years grokking grammar and semantics. Then, in liceo (the last 3 years) we would study history by translating and studying poems, speeches, plays...
Teacher and students used to discuss for hours about the meaning and context of this or that sentence. It was a wonderful way to understand our ancestors' mindset. Dead languages are the best tools for a deeper appreciation of history.
My high school was heavily focused on Latin and ancient Greek. We spent the first two years grokking grammar and semantics. Then, in liceo (the last 3 years) we would study history by translating and studying poems, speeches, plays...
Teacher and students used to discuss for hours about the meaning and context of this or that sentence. It was a wonderful way to understand our ancestors' mindset. Dead languages are the best tools for a deeper appreciation of history.
And current languages too. A while back I found this diagram http://imgur.com/ZNlwDUZ, to me it shows how logical greeks were. Terms are symmetrical, well organized, forming a tiny core of combinators.
That diagram is great, but I'm not sure this sort of preposition inventory is that specific to ancient Greek. When I studied German, I feel like we had rather similar charts.
German has specific prepositions I recognize as equivalent to each main Greek preposition as defined in that chart, except maybe the distinction between εις and εν, which German would handle by a noun case distinction (ancient Greek εις την θαλασσαν → German ins Meer (accusative, < "in das"), ancient Greek εν τῃ θαλασσῃ → German im Meer (ablative, < "in dem"). German breaks up some meanings differently -- "among" is unter (shared with "beneath" rather than "between") -- but anyway there are other languages with a pretty nice set of prepositions!
German has specific prepositions I recognize as equivalent to each main Greek preposition as defined in that chart, except maybe the distinction between εις and εν, which German would handle by a noun case distinction (ancient Greek εις την θαλασσαν → German ins Meer (accusative, < "in das"), ancient Greek εν τῃ θαλασσῃ → German im Meer (ablative, < "in dem"). German breaks up some meanings differently -- "among" is unter (shared with "beneath" rather than "between") -- but anyway there are other languages with a pretty nice set of prepositions!
Thanks, I'm all for finding similar structures in other languages.
I upvoted you for your last sentence alone. What high school did you go to, and is it still heavily focused on Latin and Greek?
Probably is a common Liceo Classico in Italy, where Latin and Greek are teached each for 5 and 4 hours a week during the first two years and 4 and 3 hours during the following three years.
which highlights the point that choice of subjects should very much be culture-specific.
Picking up latin as an italian seems far simpler (and probably more useful) than as an english, as you can guess large part of the lexicon and you will be exposed to "volgare" (transitional latin-italian) when studying early italian literature.
But would studying Old English be of any use for italians? I am not sure.
Picking up latin as an italian seems far simpler (and probably more useful) than as an english, as you can guess large part of the lexicon and you will be exposed to "volgare" (transitional latin-italian) when studying early italian literature.
But would studying Old English be of any use for italians? I am not sure.
Yes, I attended an experimental classico.
On a day to day basis, the average American is simply actually a lot likelier to encounter Latin biological nomenclature or legal or religious terminology than, say, a fluent conversation in German.
The United States is largely monolingual in English for a thousand miles, and the language ideology here causes immigrants to want their children to shift to English monolingualism as quickly as possible. And thus bad Latin is more useful than bad German.
The United States is largely monolingual in English for a thousand miles, and the language ideology here causes immigrants to want their children to shift to English monolingualism as quickly as possible. And thus bad Latin is more useful than bad German.
The real problem I run into as someone who speaks English natively and German as a second language is, outside of the Internet and reading books, I never have a chance to speak German. Even in the actual country of Germany, I speak German just bad enough that I can tell it's painful for people to listen to me struggle, and they'll quickly switch to English if they know it (which they do). The only benefit is I know what the weather forecast will be and I know what the announcements at the Bahnhof mean, so I know what train to get on.
I've visited Mexico with my Spanish-speaking wife (semi-natively) and while the locals loved to hear her speak their language, we communicated mostly in English if we wanted to be easily understood.
The struggle is real for Americans, or for native English speakers as a whole. For Americans, there is no other language spoken for thousands of miles like you mentioned (Mexico and Quebec (to a limited extent)), and even then, most of the people we interact with on vacation will speak English.
I put serious effort into maintain my German, and she puts serious effort into maintaining her Spanish. But we rarely have the chance to actually use it, even if we're in a country that speaks the language. English has won.
I've visited Mexico with my Spanish-speaking wife (semi-natively) and while the locals loved to hear her speak their language, we communicated mostly in English if we wanted to be easily understood.
The struggle is real for Americans, or for native English speakers as a whole. For Americans, there is no other language spoken for thousands of miles like you mentioned (Mexico and Quebec (to a limited extent)), and even then, most of the people we interact with on vacation will speak English.
I put serious effort into maintain my German, and she puts serious effort into maintaining her Spanish. But we rarely have the chance to actually use it, even if we're in a country that speaks the language. English has won.
You are using English because you are using English. When I lived in Germany I used German nearly 100% of the time, and now I speak fluent German with hardly a hitch. 10 years later I regularly run into German speakers, and while it feels a little rusty now, I continue using German because I know if I fall back on English Im going to be using English and not learning German. I recommend you adopt the same learning strategy.
I have been learning Chinese in China for about 7 months, and have a functional command of most conversations because I never ever use English during those conversations. English will always win if you keep biking with the training wheels on.
When I lived in Cambodia for an even longer time I didnt learn nearly as much Khmer because I was constantly speaking in English, even though I diligently listened to Khmer conversations and researched the language. Like programming, language learning is much slower as a spectator sport.
I have been learning Chinese in China for about 7 months, and have a functional command of most conversations because I never ever use English during those conversations. English will always win if you keep biking with the training wheels on.
When I lived in Cambodia for an even longer time I didnt learn nearly as much Khmer because I was constantly speaking in English, even though I diligently listened to Khmer conversations and researched the language. Like programming, language learning is much slower as a spectator sport.
Right, that's what I'm saying. It's harder to learn another language as an English speaker because there far less incentive to speak anything other than English. Because most people I end up talking to around the world can speak their native language and English, so we both end up speaking English. Sometimes we're speaking English at their request (I've known people who refuse to speak to me in their native language) and sometimes at my request (I really need to understand them and not mishear something).
In my travels, I've yet to run into someone who I really need to talk to who only speaks their native (non-English) language.
In my travels, I've yet to run into someone who I really need to talk to who only speaks their native (non-English) language.
Aren't there some web sites/services/communities where you can speak with like-minded people? I think I remember that I've visited about half a dozen of these things over the past year.
And feel free to drop me a mail and have a call if you want. :)
And feel free to drop me a mail and have a call if you want. :)
ごんばって、ね！
So I put that into Google Translate and it detects it as Japanese. It then translates it into English as "Gonba~tsu Te, ne!" So I have no idea what you're saying.
Good lord, Google Translate is even worse with Japanese than I remember. Sorry! This is a very common phrase in Japanese, that comes up all the time. It means something like "Please work very hard", but it's meant to be very encouraging!
You misspelled your Japanese. In Chinese characters the term is "頑張って," and in kana it is "がんばって." Google Translate did the best it could with what you wrote.
It's still an interesting commentary on Google's handling of Japanese kana. I knew immediately what the GP comment meant to say, but googling (.co.jp) for "ごんばって" doesn't even come up with a "did you mean...?"
I disagree with this.
There's this common argument that prescribes utility to studying Latin via the value you gain by understanding biological, legal, and religious terminology.
I think that the net utility that you gain through this mechanism is approximately zero. Or rather, the net utility over other, more direct methods of acquiring this knowledge is zero. I think you could gain the requisite understanding of Latin to gain 99% of this utility in a few weeks of study, and that if understanding these roots is so important it should be material in our English classes, not in a long-term study of the Latin language itself.
Besides the "it helps you to know roots" argument, the study of a language gains utility largely in being able to speak the language, make do when traveling to places where the language is spoken, or consume the literature and media in the language. Moreover, the utility you gain from the language increases exponentially - a year of (half-assed, high-school-level) study is pretty useless, but after a few years of it, especially with higher (college-level?) standards, it's immensely useful because it opens you up to whole new worlds.
I think the best argument for teaching languages in high school is that this exponential growth starts earlier and is more likely to ever happen (especially for people who don't go to college or don't study languages there) if we start earlier.
Granted, there's utility gained from appreciating the culture of the language even as you learn the beginnings of it in high school, but I think that's dwarfed by the long-term potential for useful bilingualism and having the ability to more more easily experience new cultures.
--
also, anecdotally, my bad Latin has given me essentially 0 utility in my entire life since high school. Perhaps I got a few novelty realizations here and there, like identifying that "tractor" came from "trahere" and "et" means "and" in "et cetera", but those are trivial. Maybe my experience was unusual and others gained more from it. Also, admittedly, I can't really quantify or remember whether it improved my SAT scores or whatnot, but my overall assessment is that my Latin study was negligible.
There's this common argument that prescribes utility to studying Latin via the value you gain by understanding biological, legal, and religious terminology.
I think that the net utility that you gain through this mechanism is approximately zero. Or rather, the net utility over other, more direct methods of acquiring this knowledge is zero. I think you could gain the requisite understanding of Latin to gain 99% of this utility in a few weeks of study, and that if understanding these roots is so important it should be material in our English classes, not in a long-term study of the Latin language itself.
Besides the "it helps you to know roots" argument, the study of a language gains utility largely in being able to speak the language, make do when traveling to places where the language is spoken, or consume the literature and media in the language. Moreover, the utility you gain from the language increases exponentially - a year of (half-assed, high-school-level) study is pretty useless, but after a few years of it, especially with higher (college-level?) standards, it's immensely useful because it opens you up to whole new worlds.
I think the best argument for teaching languages in high school is that this exponential growth starts earlier and is more likely to ever happen (especially for people who don't go to college or don't study languages there) if we start earlier.
Granted, there's utility gained from appreciating the culture of the language even as you learn the beginnings of it in high school, but I think that's dwarfed by the long-term potential for useful bilingualism and having the ability to more more easily experience new cultures.
--
also, anecdotally, my bad Latin has given me essentially 0 utility in my entire life since high school. Perhaps I got a few novelty realizations here and there, like identifying that "tractor" came from "trahere" and "et" means "and" in "et cetera", but those are trivial. Maybe my experience was unusual and others gained more from it. Also, admittedly, I can't really quantify or remember whether it improved my SAT scores or whatnot, but my overall assessment is that my Latin study was negligible.
Certainly it is much more valuable to teach kids language early on, beginning in primary school. Dual immersion schools seem to be very successful at teaching bilingualism. The problem is that in the US, the status quo is instead minimal classroom language education very late.
Arguably, you could say that about many bodies of knowledge as much as Latin. The question is really: What percentage of people take that mandatory one year minimum of high school language and really build it into something valuable? I think it's pretty low. And,
bad German < bad Latin < good Latin < good German
U.S. school systems generally are simply unwilling to invest the resources needed to get kids really bilingual.
Arguably, you could say that about many bodies of knowledge as much as Latin. The question is really: What percentage of people take that mandatory one year minimum of high school language and really build it into something valuable? I think it's pretty low. And,
bad German < bad Latin < good Latin < good German
U.S. school systems generally are simply unwilling to invest the resources needed to get kids really bilingual.
That's fair. I think I agree with your ordering. Our language education really is abysmal. Only Spanish really has a good chance of catching on outside of the classroom since it is gaining prominence in American culture (in my observation).
I do think that if all language programs are bad at a school then bad-Spanish would still have a higher utility than bad-Latin.
I do think that if all language programs are bad at a school then bad-Spanish would still have a higher utility than bad-Latin.
Knowing some of the changes Latin went through on its way to Spanish helped me at least once. I would use (inflict?) my Spanish on the kind folks at a nearby Mexican restaurant, and when I ordered a fajita quesadilla, the server asked me if I wanted "hongo". I thought for a second, recalled the "f" -> "h" transition (e.g. ferrum -> hierro, facere -> hacer) and "u" to "o"... aha! fungus! Why yes, I do want mushrooms on my fajita quesadilla.
Constructing things with compasses was the only time I remember doing any creative problem solving in my whole school career.
That may be true, but there are other ways of doing creating problem solving in mathematics that aren't as .. specialized. I'd rather figure out how to teach fields to get you that experience more effectively on more generally useful problems, than regress to proxying a math education with a compass-construction education. [seriously, if you read those old Harvard entrance exams from the 1800s, more than half math is compass problems.]
I actually got to do lots of creative problem solving somehow, but I understand how many did not. Coding is where that really took off but I did math contests and stuff when I was younger.
I actually got to do lots of creative problem solving somehow, but I understand how many did not. Coding is where that really took off but I did math contests and stuff when I was younger.
Guess what determines school curricula in most cases? The opinions of the parents who care enough to go to school board meetings, serve on the board or complain to officials.
From the article: "Four people had been listed as 'attending' on the Facebook page for the event, but by the time the meeting began, eight Esperantists were sitting in a rough semicircle of dormroom couches and hard plastic chairs." Ladies and gentlemen, that is in New York City, where a social club meeting on almost any topic might be expected to attract more attendance. Esperanto has severe growth problems if that is how interesting it is to prospective learners.
I have used some Esperanto textbooks to learn a bit of Esperanto, and I have read whole books about the artificial language movement and the development of Esperanto over time. If we take Esperanto to be a hobby, like stamp collecting, then I say "More power to you" if you are interested in Esperanto. But if we take Esperanto as a serious proposal to produce a practical "interlanguage" for worldwide communication, then we have to count Esperanto as a failure. Esperanto has had fewer speakers (to a given level of proficiency) and fewer readers (likewise) in all time than either English or Chinese gains in one year simply by natural increase and extension of education to the masses.
As I studied Esperanto, along with studying human languages such as Chinese (four modern Sinitic languages and also ancient Literary Chinese), Russian, German, Japanese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic Greek and Koine Greek, and assorted other languages, I was struck by how many design bugs Esperanto has. Many of the decisions made by Ludwik Zamenhof as he designed Esperanto reflected exactly the languages he knew in childhood in Russian-occupied Poland, but didn't reflect at all what makes a language easy to learn or to use as a second language with speakers of varied backgrounds. I used to think that I would have to do a write-up about the flaws of Esperanto myself, but then in the 1990s I discovered an online description of Esperanto by a sophisticated student of constructed languages,[1] and I see by checking the link again that that description has been continually updated over the last two decades.
The statement in the article kindly submitted here that "Esperanto is an artificial language, designed to have perfectly regular grammar, with none of the messy exceptions of natural tongues" is demonstrably false, and the link I have shared here will show the statement to be false. What ultimately turned me off to Esperanto as a movement and even as a hobby was seeing frankly incredible statements about Esperanto and about other human languages made by Esperanto-hobbyists who thought they were proposing a practical tool for world communication. If Esperanto is your hobby, more power to you. But if you propose Esperanto as a world interlanguage, you had best acknowledge the reality that Esperanto has always failed in that role, and always will.
[1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
I have used some Esperanto textbooks to learn a bit of Esperanto, and I have read whole books about the artificial language movement and the development of Esperanto over time. If we take Esperanto to be a hobby, like stamp collecting, then I say "More power to you" if you are interested in Esperanto. But if we take Esperanto as a serious proposal to produce a practical "interlanguage" for worldwide communication, then we have to count Esperanto as a failure. Esperanto has had fewer speakers (to a given level of proficiency) and fewer readers (likewise) in all time than either English or Chinese gains in one year simply by natural increase and extension of education to the masses.
As I studied Esperanto, along with studying human languages such as Chinese (four modern Sinitic languages and also ancient Literary Chinese), Russian, German, Japanese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic Greek and Koine Greek, and assorted other languages, I was struck by how many design bugs Esperanto has. Many of the decisions made by Ludwik Zamenhof as he designed Esperanto reflected exactly the languages he knew in childhood in Russian-occupied Poland, but didn't reflect at all what makes a language easy to learn or to use as a second language with speakers of varied backgrounds. I used to think that I would have to do a write-up about the flaws of Esperanto myself, but then in the 1990s I discovered an online description of Esperanto by a sophisticated student of constructed languages,[1] and I see by checking the link again that that description has been continually updated over the last two decades.
The statement in the article kindly submitted here that "Esperanto is an artificial language, designed to have perfectly regular grammar, with none of the messy exceptions of natural tongues" is demonstrably false, and the link I have shared here will show the statement to be false. What ultimately turned me off to Esperanto as a movement and even as a hobby was seeing frankly incredible statements about Esperanto and about other human languages made by Esperanto-hobbyists who thought they were proposing a practical tool for world communication. If Esperanto is your hobby, more power to you. But if you propose Esperanto as a world interlanguage, you had best acknowledge the reality that Esperanto has always failed in that role, and always will.
[1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
As a polyglot, I tried to get into Esperanto several times, but can't get over its ugliness, complex phoneme inventory, unnecessary grammar complexity, strong European roots, abundance of consonant clusters, and overall language bugs. Sure natural languages are worse, but you expect a lot more from a language that was designed from scratch to be consistent and easy to learn. If you don't already speak a European language, good luck.
I really wish Reformed Esperanto had usurped Esperanto, which fixed a lot of the bugs.
I really wish Reformed Esperanto had usurped Esperanto, which fixed a lot of the bugs.
> Most people I know despise Esperanto, but largely for daft reasons [from 1]
When I first read about Esperanto decades ago, I was immediately put off by it only using languages from the Indo-European language family as a source for vocabulary and grammar. Any good constructed language intended for worldwide use as a universal second language would also need to source vocab and patterns from Arabic, Swahili, Turkish, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Indonesian, all of which are from different language families, not to mention less numerically used language families.
When I first read about Esperanto decades ago, I was immediately put off by it only using languages from the Indo-European language family as a source for vocabulary and grammar. Any good constructed language intended for worldwide use as a universal second language would also need to source vocab and patterns from Arabic, Swahili, Turkish, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Indonesian, all of which are from different language families, not to mention less numerically used language families.
Are you saying that Esperanto is harder to learn than English, Chinese, or Spanish?
Are you saying that Esperanto is harder to learn than English, Chinese, or Spanish?
Yes, definitely, depending on what language the learner has as a native language, and especially if active speaking and listening is included as part of the test of language proficiency to an equivalent level.
Yes, definitely, depending on what language the learner has as a native language, and especially if active speaking and listening is included as part of the test of language proficiency to an equivalent level.
Esperanto is a "failure" only if help up to standards and goals that are completely unrealistic.
Compare English: Britain spread it throughout a global empire for centuries. America is the world's fourth most populous country, possibly the most powerful and prosperous country in the history of the world, and nearly entirely monolingual in English. India is the world's second most populous country, where English is the major language of intercommunication. Nigeria, the Philippines, and other large countries use English in an official capacity. English is now the dominant language of science, and increasingly the language of intercommunication in Europe.
And yet for all that power, prestige, and influence, English only has 1.2 billion first- and second-language speakers, and is far from the world's only interlanguage.
So by those standards, English is a "failure" as the world interlanguage.
Edit: To be sure, Esperantists can be pretty off-putting. They are nothing if not...enthusiastic!
Compare English: Britain spread it throughout a global empire for centuries. America is the world's fourth most populous country, possibly the most powerful and prosperous country in the history of the world, and nearly entirely monolingual in English. India is the world's second most populous country, where English is the major language of intercommunication. Nigeria, the Philippines, and other large countries use English in an official capacity. English is now the dominant language of science, and increasingly the language of intercommunication in Europe.
And yet for all that power, prestige, and influence, English only has 1.2 billion first- and second-language speakers, and is far from the world's only interlanguage.
So by those standards, English is a "failure" as the world interlanguage.
Edit: To be sure, Esperantists can be pretty off-putting. They are nothing if not...enthusiastic!
Last night I finished reading Vikitmoj (Victims) by Julio Baghy. The book is a semi-autobiographical story of the author's experiences in a Siberian prisoner of war camp after WWI. It's a fascinating glimpse into life in these camps and how the different populations (POWs, soldiers, peasants, Jews, bolsheviks, etc.) all interacted with each other. As an example, one practice Baghy writes of is a kind of "duel" that the POWs would sometimes engage in between each other. (In the book it came out that one of the POWs had been sleeping with the wife of another of the POWs back before they had been captured.) They weren't allowed weapons, so they had to be a little creative. They would draw lots and the loser would have to provoke the soldiers on one of their marches so that the soldiers would beat him (sometimes to death).
If you learn any national language, you'll be able to read people in a handful of cultures write about themselves in their own words. But one of the unique features of Esperanto is that after you learn it, you can read the works of people in cultures all across the globe without the need of a translator as intermediary. (Of course the subset of people in a culture who write in Esperanto is not representative of the general population, but it's better than nothing!) In particular, many of these works haven't been translated into English (or any other language for that matter), so you would have no way to read them otherwise anyway!