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Did Esperanto help you learn other languages?

by Rayden, July 6, 2014

Messages: 6

Language: English

Rayden (User's profile) July 6, 2014, 3:02:43 PM

Saluton, I've been learning Esperanto for about two weeks now and will continue to actively study it until the end of September, but then I will begin studying German (As I'm going to Berlin in July 2015). My question is, did Esperanto help you learn more languages? I currently only speak English and Afrikaans fluently, but after Esperanto and German I would love to learn French, Persian, Norwegian, Russian and Mandarin. Dankon!

Oijos (User's profile) July 6, 2014, 3:23:32 PM

It completely blocked me from learning other natural languages, because I can't find motivation to learn inferior languages.

zaragorti (User's profile) July 7, 2014, 12:27:19 AM

Oijos:It completely blocked me from learning other natural languages, because I can't find motivation to learn inferior languages.
Oijos, that's so true! I have always considered myself a keen language learner, and I was learning German and (no laughing please...) Biblical Greek. But now the rules and exceptions of these naturally evolved languages makes it frustrating for me to carry on. As someone (famous I think) said about the 'natural' languages, 'The first French speakers were just a bunch of people speaking Latin badly'. Zamenhof certainly got it right!

SWDusono (User's profile) July 7, 2014, 4:07:45 PM

I learned national languages first, so I can't really give a great answer to this. However, I have been learning Esperanto on my own for a few weeks, and I find that I have been particularly curious about vocabulary and grammar. More so than when I was learning Spanish or German, for example, I find myself wondering "How would I say...in Esperanto?"

pablo4856 (User's profile) July 7, 2014, 5:01:25 PM

I have been learning German for two years now and Esperanto has helped me a lot. Esperanto grammar is completely regular and so it works like a basic model to which I compare any new concept that I am taught in German. For example, when I was learning the German Accusative I already knew how to recognize when a word should be in accusative, because I had already learnt the akuzativo in Esperanto; and since Esperanto is completely regular, the acussative was a clear concept for me to grasp; all words in that case end with -n. If you have already learnt when to apply the -n in Esperanto it will be easier to learn to conjugate German articles in it, since in English we don't have a special conjugation for it(except for personal pronouns.)

morfran (User's profile) July 7, 2014, 6:06:37 PM

Insofar as my Esperanto grammar books more clearly and concisely explained the accusative case than my other grammar books at the time, it definitely helped with getting the Russian and Latin inflections straight in my head back when I was studying them. It may have helped, too, that Esperanto’s derived adverbs often function as an instrumental and locative case.

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