nornen: ...please remember that English isn't my language...

I actually did not know that.

Also, you appear to have caught me in an edit, and the text of my post had changed as you were posting. Sorry about that; not trying to edit my post from under you.

nornen:How can anybody's level of comprehension be raised, if nobody ever communicated beyond the current level of comprehension of the listener.

You have to consider the audience. Lernu is not a graduate level course open only to college students. Curious ordinary junior high school students come here. Mill-workers and taxi-drivers come here. Regular people who graduated high school twenty years ago and never went beyond that come here. The language you are using isn't just a little over their heads; for many you are talking calculus to students who haven't mastered (or don't remember) algebra.

Graduate students in linguistics also come here. And when they talk amongst themselves they are unintelligible to a great many people, for whom the terminology they are using may as well be Latin. Actually, sometimes it is.

I'm not saying that highly technical language shouldn't be used between people who know what it means and understand its importance. But if some random person just wants to know how to do something that in practice isn't that hard, I try to match the level of the answer with the level of the question. Sure, push it up a little bit if you want. But be aware of whether what you are saying is really conveying anything to your audience - if you're too far above them, you're just conveying the idea that Esperanto is too hard, which is probably not what you actually want for them to get out of your explanations.

RiotNrrd:You have to consider the audience. Lernu is not a graduate level course open only to college students. Curious ordinary junior high school students come here. Mill-workers and taxi-drivers come here.

+1

When I used to tutor here, I had everyone from middle school students to retirees, with educational levels ranging from less than a high school education to advanced graduate degrees.

Rules of thumb can be a huge help to language learners, with the right caveats. It helps get them into the habit of saying things correctly and get them comfortable with speaking. I had a rule of thumb I used to tell to students who had a problem with the -n ending. I'd tell them "I am happy to tell you all of these rules in detail, if you ask, but if you are interested mainly in speaking correctly most of the time, this rule will give you the correct ending about 99% of the time. Once you are confident with the most frequent scenario, you can worry about the remaining 1%". It was usually obvious to me which learners would benefit from (and understand) the full detailed explanation and which would get better results with the rule of thumb. It was also usually obvious to me, based on how well someone was doing in the course, what kinds of mistakes they made, and what kind of questions they asked, whether they would get anything out of a detailed technical explanation.

...truthfully, if someone never learned ANYTHING about -n other than my rule of thumb, and if they used my rule of thumb correctly every time, they would still be speaking more grammatically than more than half the Esperanto speakers I hear at large conventions.

erinja:

RiotNrrd:You have to consider the audience. Lernu is not a graduate level course open only to college students. Curious ordinary junior high school students come here. Mill-workers and taxi-drivers come here.

+1

When I used to tutor here, I had everyone from middle school students to retirees, with educational levels ranging from less than a high school education to advanced graduate degrees.

Rules of thumb can be a huge help to language learners, with the right caveats. It helps get them into the habit of saying things correctly and get them comfortable with speaking. I had a rule of thumb I used to tell to students who had a problem with the -n ending. I'd tell them "I am happy to tell you all of these rules in detail, if you ask, but if you are interested mainly in speaking correctly most of the time, this rule will give you the correct ending about 99% of the time. Once you are confident with the most frequent scenario, you can worry about the remaining 1%". It was usually obvious to me which learners would benefit from (and understand) the full detailed explanation and which would get better results with the rule of thumb. It was also usually obvious to me, based on how well someone was doing in the course, what kinds of mistakes they made, and what kind of questions they asked, whether they would get anything out of a detailed technical explanation.

...truthfully, if someone never learned ANYTHING about -n other than my rule of thumb, and if they used my rule of thumb correctly every time, they would still be speaking more grammatically than more than half the Esperanto speakers I hear at large conventions.

So, what is thy rule of thumb?