If you want a mind opening experience about semantics, go for Lojban - then you literally are forced to think about what a word truly means.

I think many EO speakers find themselves discovering these intricacies of semantics and how their language isn't absolute not because of Esperanto so much because of their own natural disposition to discover this sort of thing.

Esperanto taught me relatively little compared to other languages when it came to semantics.

The only languages that I can think of that would have very little benefit for an English speaker's perspective on the world around them are English itself and Scots - even then you can teach someone about the perspective of semantics a language provides by teaching them the history of English, the shift of meaning in words and the etymology of words.

Esperanto's ease makes it convenient to a degree, but it doesn't provide any exceedingly unique perspective though. If it did, it'd wouldn't be so much a mid-way approach to the so called "language crisis", it'd be a "way out of the way in no-mans land where no one can hear you scream" approach (that might have its benefits as far as neutrality goes though).

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For clarification - there are many things I can use an Esperanto dictionary for and get a very similar word to what I'd expect in English with fairly similar uses. When that isn't the case, it's not because Esperanto is necessarily doing something special, but because English is the one doing something special, thus theoretically any language could be used, if the mind was prepared to look.

Similarly, a closed minded person learning Esperanto won't get much special out of it, but Esperanto's not really attractive to those people anyway since it doesn't have any financial benefit or anything like that.

Chainy:Choice doesn't really come into it, at least in Britain. Everyone has to study at least one foreign language in secondary school. It is regarded as a compulsory subject.

I'm not sure that it is, Chainy. I'm 99.9% sure that it was dropped as a compulsory subject last year.

I can't find a contemporary announcement that modern languages were being dropped as a core subject but there is a report from January of this year that the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, "signalled the possible return of a compulsory modern foreign language at GCSE" and "[w]hen asked whether he was "leaving the door open" to making modern foreign languages compulsory at GCSE" replied that he was.

Source

I might try replicating the experiment from the episode where permission to use a taboo word at leisure saw Stephen Fry's endurance of frozen water leap from about 20 seconds to over two minutes, and then see whether it works in Esperanto too. Once the snow falls, I think I'll give it a go.

Excellent Tim.

But in repeating the experiment, do have two control conditions. One in which the repeated word has nothing to do with the pain experience eg 'tablo' and one in which the repeated item reflects your feelings but is not 'taboo' eg 'malvarmega'.

I expect the result that was demonstrated may have more to do with the disconnect between the pain and the neutral word rather than the efficacy of a swear word in heightening ones pain endurance.

Also the replication should involve a subject who has no knowledge of the expected result and furthermore should be conducted with the neutral word condition first and then with the neutral word second, to control for simple habituation to the pain.

I suspect that there are a whole raft of psycholinguistic experiments with interesting results that it would be profitable to replicate with Esperanto.

A disparity of results between the experiments with national languages, and then with Esperanto, may falsify the conclusions of the psycholinguists about language and prove to be of considerable academic importance.

Ceiger, if the only educational benefit of foreign language learning lay in the disparity of semantic fields, then you might get this benefit by simply using a bilingual dictionary (one that had examples of use) rather than actual requiring the learner to cope with gender, irregular verbs, irregular plurals, idioms galore, spelling unrelated to pronunciation and the rest of the malarkey.

But the potential educational benefits of foreign language learning go beyond that

What distinguishes Esperanto from the other languages is that you get to the interesting bits so quickly - without having to surmount the barrier of a whole lot of historically inherited baggage, that has a consequence that, after 5 years of study of a foreign language in school, students are still unable to string together a sentence.

(Refer to many comments in these forums from neanglalingvanoj about their experiences in learning English.)

Timtim:
I'm not sure that it is, Chainy. I'm 99.9% sure that it was dropped as a compulsory subject last year.

I have to admit that I've been out of the country (Britain) for quite a few years now, so I didn't pick up on this change.

According to various reports on the internet, secondary schools started dropping foreign languages as a compulsory subject in 2002. Then this was made official by the the government at the end of 2004 - foreign languages became an 'optional subject'. All secondary schools were supposed to make at least foreign language available to students. But, various reports have shown a huge drop in the number of pupils studying foreign languages, particularly in state schools. On the other hand, most private schools have individually chosen to stick with foreign languages as a compulsory subject.

At the same time as dropping foreign languages as a compulsory subject in secondary schools, the goverment also suggested shifting language learning to primary school. But according to one report that I noticed, they are only now thinking of actually making foreign languages compulsory in primary schools (between the ages of 7-12).

Teaching foreign languages in primary school is definitely a good idea, but I find it utterly bizarre that they dropped this as a compulsory subject in secondary school. Rather a mixed message, really.

I was absolutely shocked when I discovered all this. For generations it has always been compulsory to learn a foreign language at school in Britain. What on earth made the government change its mind on this one?!

I heard some hilarious (and equally very disturbing) reports about a huge rise in people studying, for example, religious studies instead of languages as it's much easier to get a good grade in the former. Many state schools even promote this kind of behaviour, so they can boost their result tables, thus giving the impression that they are a more successful school. What an insane situation.

Chainy:I was absolutely shocked when I discovered all this. For generations it has always been compulsory to learn a foreign language at school in Britain. What on earth made the government change its mind on this one?!

Same situation in Australia, and it comes down to a cominbation of things IMHO:
1) Shortsighted stupidity (polymaths are POLYmaths, not "we only learnt one discipline in our school life"-maths! )

2) Pandering to the academically, victimised weak* (rather than helping them become top of the class!)

*It's worth explaining what I mean here - basically, before I finished school, when the "old system" was still semi-intact but still had largely dissipated, one major complaint was that students were being left behind, things were too complex to teach kids, kids didn't need to learn XYZ because it's no longer used, and so on.

As a result, to stop parents from complaining etc, schools and the govt have allowed standards to drop so kids don't get left behind - so, instead of pushing kids along so they can keep up, things are now geared to be more favourable for those struggling. (like, algebra used to be done in primary school, now it's really just high-school stuff....)

What the should be doing is keeping the original pace that allows the truly bright to be guided by the system, and then pooling resources to push or even drag the low-achievers in a subject along, which was the main problem with the "old system", kids getting educationally left behind. But oh well...

Also problematic is the cutting of humanities/social sciences since they are deemed inferior to physical sciences and things like engineering and mathematics, although those alone aren't a guaranteed way to make students think outside of the box and isn't in line at all with what the traditional great-thinkers were like (most of which were polymaths if I'm correct?).

Another parallel is that in physical education, running matches of games during class is not encouraged since it promotes competitiveness which means some kids lose, and some get left out of all the action (e.g. boys taking over a game of rugby leaving the girls to talk about hair product). The idea being that kids will "learn" enough about the sport to make informed decisions as they get older in life about what sport they want to play.

Basically, it's the polar opposite of social darwinism, rather than taming that beast to work for everyone (darwinism means survival of the fit? It's easy to make that work for socialist things like education - simply try to make everyone fit and they'll survive!)

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I'm sorry for that essay and a half. It's a topic that causes me great frustration, being at uni and seeing how the education system is being deconstructed to a pile of opinionated nonsense.

sudanglo:What distinguishes Esperanto from the other languages is that you get to the interesting bits so quickly - without having to surmount the barrier of a whole lot of historically inherited baggage, that has a consequence that, after 5 years of study of a foreign language in school, students are still unable to string together a sentence.

Touché, mon ami (dunno if "touché" actually makes sense in French though )

Mind you, I reckon that language tuition in schools is inherently broken in many ways in the Anglosphere, probably given its decentralised, slack nature. European and Asian schools seem to do a much better job at language tuition than the Anglosphere does (and maths too! 2 words: Japanese people. If you're average at maths, and from a more recent generation like X, Y or Z, compare yourself with a Japanese person who's average at maths, and prepare for feeling inferior! )

Although, in some locations, a forgein language may not be required (it varies from state to state, city to city, school to school. Schools have the autonomy to require make certain subjects mandatory), most (secondary school) students do take a foreign language. If you expect to attend college, most require a foreign language, and one can opt out if they have already taken a language in secondary school (2 years minimum). Where I live, I'd say >95% take a foreign language. In the inner cities, it may be different, but most of the US does not live in the inner cities, they live in the suburbs, medium and small size towns (cities), and in the country.

my 2 cents worth.

Chainy:

erinja:But in the English-speaking world, most people don't choose to study any foreign language at all.

Choice doesn't really come into it, at least in Britain. Everyone has to study at least one foreign language in secondary school. It is regarded as a compulsory subject.

Is it not the same situation in other English-speaking countries?