On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 4:33 PM Hartmut Holzgraefe <hart...@php.net> wrote:
> On 25.02.20 15:36, Tomek wrote: > > Everyone uses the same learning > > costs when using Esperanto, they do not have the privileged ones. > > I'd assume that the cost argument doesn't hold, it's going to be more > easy for Europeans than for e.g. Chinese or Japanese. It starts with > the letters used, which give people that have grown up with a a > Latinbased language a first head start, and it continues with the > vocabulary > that is also favoring (west) European learners. (Can't say anything > about the grammer, I'm not that deep into it, but I assume the same > is true for that, too) > I actually learned Esperanto and am a great fan. Learning English properly is notoriously hard for most of the world's population. Native speakers always are at an advantage. Europeans coming from Germanic and Scandinavian languages have a bigger advantage for learning English. All Europeans have an advantage if they wanted to learn Esperanto. Esperanto is written like it is spoken and vice versa. Completely phonetic by design. The grammar has 20 rules and not a single exception. The grammar is extremely easy, even when it takes some getting used to at first. But that can be said about all languages. Most people can learn the basics in a crash course of 24 hours. Fluency can be achieved by people used to the Latin script in 3 months, for people using other scripts this becomes 6 months and then their level would be better than if they had learned English for 6+ years. It would be nice if the whole world's population would decide to teach Esperanto to their children as a second language. 20 years later everyone would be able to communicate with anyone else, at the same level. I also realise this is not going to happen anytime soon. The world is more likely to switch to Chinese instead, than to do something that would make a lot of sense. Anyway, the reason I wanted to learn Esperanto is because I wanted to figure out whether it's possible to express oneself in an 'artificially' created language; and yes, it's possible. Sometimes with even more nuance than in other languages. Anyway, just my €0.2 After having learned Esperanto I have continued to learn other languages. I wouldn't say it has failed. It's still present after more than a hundred years. Let's hope the world population comes to its senses, but I'm not holding my breath. Having said all that, I don't think it would make sense to put Esperanto in our name object for international features. Not before 30% of the world's population decided to learn it first, anyway. Polyglot
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