No matter which language, there is no better way to learn it than as a baby.

Reminds me of Dave Barry :

I attempted to learn Japanese by reading a book called "Japanese at a Glance" in the plane from San Francisco to Tokyo. This is not the method recommended by experts. The method recommended by experts is to be born as a Japanese baby and raised by a Japanese family, in Japan.

Amike,

Paul

Forigite

Hyperboreus:... to it, is balderdash. (Nice word)

And you used it correctly!

Don't overuse it though. The average American (just as an example) probably uses it 0 to 3 times in a year. With a heavier weighting given to 0. Twice a week and it's an obvious affectation.

We may now return to our scheduled programming.

pdenisowski:

Hyperboreus:Exactely the same process is happening to German nowadays. (Der Dativ ist dem Genetiv sein Tod. Very nice pun.)

Don't know if you've seen them, but Bastien Sick has written a series of books with this title (Folge 1-4). I've read the first three and they're an EXCELLENT (and very amusing) description of how the German language is changing over time.

Amike,

Paul

Note however that they do contain some factual errors, as the book "Sick of Sick" (yes, that’s its actual title ) by Andre Meinunger points out.

edit: seems that this was my 5000th message, just for the records.

I just cannot follow certain trains of thought, like it is easier to learn a language as an adult than as a baby,

Did I say that? I thought I was saying that it is easier to learn Esperanto as an adult than as a baby.

As an adult you can grasp the mechanisms of Esperanto (how the language works) in a week's intensive study.

No baby could match that with a natural language.

I never interpreted any of your comments about Esperanto as an attack, Hyperboreus.

It's a question of starting from different viewpoints concerning an accurate description of the language.

There must be some features of Esperanto that are shared with the natural languages, but there are enough that are not, in order to warrant placing it in a different category.

My objection is to the line of reasoning that because natural languages do this or that then Esperanto must also do this or that.

Of course Esperanto must undergo (and already has undergone) some evolution, but not evolution which conflicts with regularity.

The English of today may be unintelligible to someone from 800 years ago.

But in 800 years Esperanto's characteristics should be recognizable to someone from the 21st century (or even the 19th). It's just that some words will have acquired new meanings and new words will have been added.

A linguist was once asked how one could make the warning signs on nuclear waste sites understandable for someone in 10,000 years time. I think he said it would be impossible.

He should have said write them in Esperanto.

Forigite

Hyperboreus:
Why do I have to say "Mi vidis ke li dormis" and not "Mi vidis lian dormadon" which would be the natural way of saying it (from the mayan point of view).

There is actually nothing wrong with mi vidis lian dormadon.

Forigite

Hyperboreus:

darkweasel:

Hyperboreus:
Why do I have to say "Mi vidis ke li dormis" and not "Mi vidis lian dormadon" which would be the natural way of saying it (from the mayan point of view).

There is actually nothing wrong with mi vidis lian dormadon.

Right. Let's add a direct object: If you wanted to say "Ich sah, dass er einen Apfel aß." would you say "Mi vidis ke li manĝis pomon." or "Mi vidis lian manĝadon de pomo."?

I would say the first one, but the second one is not incorrect.

I understand that it's tricky to learn a language with very different aspects to a language that you speak. But in some cases I think it's not as hard as you make out, Hyperboreus.

Languages from different families work differently, but to me, an intelligent adult can learn these things. Especially for a language like Esperanto, where things are simplified and regular.

To me, exceptions are what make languages hard. When you don't have a logical rule to follow, it's hard. When the language follows a certain logical system, you can learn that system with relative ease, even if it's quite different than your own system. With a logical system, memorizing the vocabulary tends to be the most difficult part of a language.

Not everything is natural and not everything is easy. But you can learn these things, it's not that hard. I say this as an English speaker who has spent some time studying Hebrew, which is Semitic, not Indo-European. It has some features that are totally foreign to Indo-European languages, but you simply explain these features, and it's fine, it's not a big deal.

As a small example, learners of Hebrew must learn that the word "you" has a masculine and a feminine form, and verbs also have a masculine and feminine form. Therefore "I love you" could be four different expressions, depending on whether a man or a woman is the subject, and whether a man or woman is the object!

That's a very small example, and Hebrew has many of these characteristics that are totally unnatural to speakers of Indo-European languages. But you explain how it works and it's not that hard, the adult learner is more than capable of learning this.

The simple fact of something working very differently doesn't make a language difficult to learn. It's not so hard to learn that "you" has to have both a masculine and feminine form, for example. It's not that hard to learn that Hebrew says "there is to me a [ ]" instead of "I have a [ ]".