The best thing for each of us, I think, is to pay attention to our own personal studies, which are our business, and let others worry about theirs, which are not.

Ganove:

Uridium:Unfortunately this phenomenos is something i saw also here in this website; you cannot imagine how many people here get inscribed 5-6 years ago and still have a very very basic Esperanto knowledge.

Of course registration in Lernu is free (in the meaning of absense of obbligation, not only economic), and i dont want to begin an "hunt" for discover these users, but i really cant understand why people engaged on something that dont want to accomplish (not that they cant, this is another issue).

Well, if you look at my profile, you could think that I am an "eterna komencanto", since I registered on here in 2008.
At that time, I really admired the idea of Esperanto. But then I had to set the course for my future, so I decided to focus on my final exams in school first. Unfortunately I lost sight of Esperanto afterwards and just encountered it again in 2012 when I was tidying the bookmarks of my internet browser.

Why do I write that? I don't feel offended, I don't have to justify myself. I just don't like - to put it mildly - biases.

I didn't write this message for me, but for those members among us, who encountered similar situations.

Actually when I came back to Lernu! in 2012, I thought about using this account or creating a new one in order to avoid certain situations. I decided not to evade them but to confront them. Evading usually doesn't solve problems.

Yes, I've also been studying on-and-off so I'm definitely not as good as someone who would have studied every day for a year. I guess that implicitly made me nervous about even saying when I started, but we have to prioritize in life and it's hard to incorporate EO into daily life and always keep up with it, like while you're busy studying for exams or doing tons of job interviews.

RiotNrrd:The best thing for each of us, I think, is to pay attention to our own personal studies, which are our business, and let others worry about theirs, which are not.

Yes, that

Uridium:People that had for few months the "Esperanto-modemoment" doesn't help the Esperanto movement, just falsely increase the statistic of Esperanto-talkers, so we will have a large amount of very basic esperantists that doenst help the spreading of the language and also they doenst help theyselves because they wasted time about a language that are not able to speak or use.

Eternaj komencantoj, se vi ne volas dauxrigi, ne komencu!

I strongly disagree!

Even a very basic knowledge of Esperanto will have positive effects on the movement. They spread the idea and are part of the needed critical mass to make various breakthroughs. If more people would be like them, maybe they would have more interest in learning more?

I think they also help themselves, because knowing the basic grammar of Esperanto is the most beneficial phase in Esperanto-learning in respect of general grammar understanding, especially if it's their first foreign language experience.

The statistic argument is witless. One can have statistics according to various levels, like is already the case in one famous guesstimate.

Well, if you look at my profile, you could think that I am an "eterna komencanto", since I registered on here in 2008.
At that time, I really admired the idea of Esperanto. But then I had to set the course for my future, so I decided to focus on my final exams in school first. Unfortunately I lost sight of Esperanto afterwards and just encountered it again in 2012 when I was tidying the bookmarks of my internet browser.

Im not talking about people like you that could have serious problems and duties in their life and are obliged to avoid this issue, im talking about lazy people that get involved in something that don't want to do or doesnt have enough motivation for go ahead.

Im sure that Lernu! is not all our life, exist something more interesting on the world .

Hello RiotNrrd. You wrote in an earlier post, back in 2011, that the stages of learning Esperanto are more or less as follows: 1) learning the basics. 2) reading. 3) writing. 4) speaking.

I am in full agreement with you. But couldn't you add a fifth stage -- understanding the spoken language? Hearing another language spoken (in any manner -- Pimsleur course, podcasts, Youtube video, you name it) is very difficult for me (and no doubt, others). I am a bit hard of hearing and that may be part of the problem but it's not all the problem. I just have problems "converting" what the sound waves my ear picks up into intelligible information. That might just be a lack of familiarity with the overall sound and it would probably solve itself with enough time spend listening. But right now, it is a DEFINITE problem for me.

Listening to some of the Esperanto podcasts sounds like a mixture of Greek/Russian/Spanish/French/Italian all spoken at a 90-mile-a-minute speed. I once heard it described this way: "...in a swift Italian sentence composed of one word of two hundred syllables -- mostly vowels." So true, so true.

One aspect, as I see it, that comes into matters is the opportunity (or lack thereof) to continue with and to use what one learns. For example, I began learning French as an adolescent fifty-two years ago. However, once I left high school and university (here in the USA), I had almost no further opportunity to use it actively except for occasional reading. By the time I went to francophone Canada -- and I had learned Parisian French! -- I was hard put to understand anyone, although I could generally read the newspaper. I can still read (formal / academic) French reasonably well, but don't expect me to hold a conversation (or read sleazy novels).

It can be similar with Esperanto. When I first began to learn more about it in the 1970s (although I first learned of it at all in 1961), I would have had almost NO opportunity to speak it with anyone. The local Esperanto club where I then lived was nearly a joke. (I went to some meetings.) The Internet did not yet exist, and reading material was precious hard to come by. So I just puttered along. In my particular circumstances, with no real contacts with Esperantujo, I became a sort of eterna komencanto for lack of opportunity. It was a kind of "use it or lose it" situation.

Also, as apok2 rightly points, there can be personal issues. As I have gotten older, my hearing also has gotten a little troublesome. In noisy environments I sometimes have trouble understanding other people speaking my native (General American) English. Audio clips of Esperanto speech or songs on the Internet come across to me mostly as gibberish. For someone like me, E-o (as well as Interlingua, which I have also had involvement with) is primarily a written code, not a "real" spoken language.

apok2:Hello RiotNrrd. You wrote in an earlier post, back in 2011, that the stages of learning Esperanto are more or less as follows: 1) learning the basics. 2) reading. 3) writing. 4) speaking.

... But couldn't you add a fifth stage -- understanding the spoken language?...

I think you definitely could. I have trouble with that fifth stage myself, in fact, simply because I don't hear it enough. I am almost exclusively a written-language Esperantist.

Obviously, the stages you mention aren't hard and fast rules. People can certainly tackle the language in some different orders and suffer no ill effects. But I think people generally learn Esperanto in the order on that list, and your fifth stage fits in with the sequence well.

Ganove:
Well, if you look at my profile, you could think that I am an "eterna komencanto", since I registered on here in 2008

Mi estas la eterna komencanto sxajne: multfoje mi penas eklerni la lingvon, sed tiu afero igxis tro evitebla. Komence mi ne havis suficxe informon, nur bazaj reguloj kaj kelkaj radikoj, poste aliaj kialoj igis min forlasi lernadon. La lingvo estas interesa por mi, kaj mi estimas idealojn de movado, sed tamen mi ne scias Esperanto bone (kiel mi volas scii, vere).

Admin: Please edit your message to include an English translation, because this is the English forum

bartlett22183, what you wrote about your experiences with French was interesting. Think of the fun you would have with 'Cajun' French. I think the LSU, Baton Rouge's campus has a website with a short course in French as spoken in Louisiana. You can find more on the Cajun French Wiki. For a while, Cajun French was an endangered language but interest in it seems to be reviving. I don't speak much French but I have worked in the areas around Lafayette, Breaux Bridge, St. Martinville and New Iberia. I like it down there. When they say "Laissez les bon temps roulez," they mean it!

It seems that you, me and RiotNrrd all have a problem with spoken Esperanto -- mainly because we don't have an opportunity to hear it much. That would apply with any language we attempted to learn. But I'd wager that if we had an opportunity to speak it among ourselves, hearing losses or not, we'd soon pick it up. It's too bad that you live on the Eastcoast, I live on the Gulfcoast and RiotNrrd lives in the Pacific NW.