Hey, two questions which came up elsewhere. The questions are specifically targeted towards people who know English/English natives, so I'm posting it in the English forum.

1. How exactly is Esperanto as beneficial towards language learning as Latin? I keep seeing it equated to Latin but when I try to find how Latin helps, all I get is "It has flexible word order and cases; lots of Latin words are in other languages; it builds logic skills" and that's about it. Plus people keep only talking about how it helps with English and Romance languages (and sometimes German), nothing like Chinese or Japanese. So basically I'm not finding any info other than "it helps the same as other foreign languages + when connected to languages with lots of roots/words from Latin it helps more".

2. How do you think Esperanto would help with learning Japanese? What I came up with is basically that the translations (sentence structure and at times, words themselves) can be a lot closer.

marbuljon:Hey, two questions which came up elsewhere. The questions are specifically targeted towards people who know English/English natives, so I'm posting it in the English forum.

1. How exactly is Esperanto as beneficial towards language learning as Latin? I keep seeing it equated to Latin but when I try to find how Latin helps, all I get is "It has flexible word order and cases; lots of Latin words are in other languages; it builds logic skills" and that's about it. Plus people keep only talking about how it helps with English and Romance languages (and sometimes German), nothing like Chinese or Japanese. So basically I'm not finding any info other than "it helps the same as other foreign languages + when connected to languages with lots of roots/words from Latin it helps more".

2. How do you think Esperanto would help with learning Japanese? What I came up with is basically that the translations (sentence structure and at times, words themselves) can be a lot closer.

The argument is that the hardest language for adults to learn is the second one, because it is necessary to unlearn all the things you subconsciously "know" about language that are based on your native tongue, and learn that other languages work differently. That being so it is best to have the second language as easy as possible to learn to ease the transition, and Esperanto is claimed to be one of the easiest languages to learn.

Okay, thanks for pressing that point, I didn't realize quite how big of a problem it was before.

Though does anyone have any further ideas...?

I know that Latin is used a lot in biology/medicine and other sciences, so it helps greatly to know it for those. Latin is also the template from which the romance languages were formed, so learning it can help you learn them. From what I've heard (I don't know Latin) it is difficult to learn and has a lot of fancy rules, so perhaps it makes other languages look like a cakewalk? I can't comment on word order/etc., but I think the fundamental benefits are indeed those you mentioned (plus the use in science and the common use of Latin roots in English specifically).

From what I know of Japanese from looking at it ages ago (and what Esperantists tell me) the agglutinative nature of Japanese and other Asian languages is similar to how words are constructed in Esperanto. I suppose Esperanto can help you get used to the idea of forming words agglutinatively, and simple tenses being preferred would lend itself to the (AFAIK) simpler tense system of Japanese. Also the use of particles like "cxu" is something that is similar.

Compared to Latin and Japanese, Esperanto is by far the best choice for a "propaedeutic" first language, and there is scientific evidence for this from at least a handful of studies.

If all you want is to learn an inflected language to get used to declensions Esperanto is a bad choice as it only morphologically marks the accusative. Latin is too complex for the average mind, and so is (ancient) Greek. I recommend Finnish and Hungarian for the task, while they have around 14 declensions they're very regular as agglutinative languages by nature tend to be very regular, Georgian being the exception. Give those two languages a shot, just to get used to the inflected nature, if all you want is some foreign language experience.

But, before learning any language if the person truly wants to linguistically broaden their minds they should first learn their mother tongues. You can identify accusative, dative, locative, etc. in all languages even if they're not morphologically indicated. Most people learning a foreign language never bother to learn their mother tongues first, as a result, they learn a lot slower than they should and make mistakes in places they shouldn't. Plenty of people venture to learn and don't even know the difference between an adverb and an adjective, at least learn to do a syntactic analysis; it'll help you a lot.

Esperanto in general is a pretty useless language* except for those who want to learn a second language and don't speak any other language.

Japanese is a language isolate so Esperanto could and could not help you learn it. Japanese uses particles to indicate the function of words in a sentence, they work similar to postpositions, German and Russian would be more useful to learn Japanese than Esperanto. Syntactically speaking, Turkish would be an excellent choice, it's an agglutinative language like Japanese, super regular in all aspects and its syntax is very similar to that of Japanese.

*I mean useless for information gathering and general communication, English, Spanish, German and Russian are far more useful on the Internet for those tasks.

Suzumiya: I recommend Finnish and Hungarian for the task, while they have around 14 declensions they're very regular as agglutinative languages by nature tend to be very regular, Georgian being the exception. Give those two languages a shot, just to get used to the inflected nature, if all you want is some foreign language experience.

I'm not sure about Hungarian, but a problem with this in Finnish is that the majority of nouns have a different stem for the non-nominative/accusative/partitive cases that needs to be learned for each noun. (kirja>kirjassi, but mies>miehessi)

Suzumiya:But, before learning any language if the person truly wants to linguistically broaden their minds they should first learn their mother tongues. You can identify accusative, dative, locative, etc. in all languages even if they're not morphologically indicated. Most people learning a foreign language never bother to learn their mother tongues first, as a result, they learn a lot slower than they should and make mistakes in places they shouldn't. Plenty of people venture to learn and don't even know the difference between an adverb and an adjective, at least learn to do a syntactic analysis; it'll help you a lot.

Oh, I'm with thee on that! When I taught, I was so disgusted with the typical American student's ignorance of basic grammar that I convinced the school administrator to let me offer an "English grammar for language learning" class for all the 8th year students in preparation for Spanish or French classes they had to take starting in 9th year.

Suzumiya: Syntactically speaking, Turkish would be an excellent choice, it's an agglutinative language like Japanese, super regular in all aspects and its syntax is very similar to that of Japanese.

Interesting that thee mentioned Georgian and Turkish here.....I once had a (very arrogant) Spanish professor who poo-poo'ed Esperanto, mainly for the reason that "it puts the plural marker before the case marker; real languages don't do that!" To which I replied "well, I hope to God thee never tries telling a Turk or a Georgian that their language isn't real!" At his confused look, I informed him that those two languages do exactly what he just said "real" languages don't do. He refused to believe me (after all I was *only* an undergraduate and he was a PHD, ferpitysake!) until I got a Georgian grammar and a Turkish grammar from the university library and showed him. I tried not to look smug, honest! But I don't think I was successful

About Latin helping with Romance languages... I found this:

http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.se/2011/02/latin-...

Basically it says "Latin is similar enough in the look of the vocabulary that it helps, but since the grammar is different it can actually mess you up more".

How close can Esperanto copy Japanese sentence structure? I want to try, but it's hard to find "long, difficult sentences full of weird word order" if you know what I mean.

(As for the USA and English grammar - I never learned grammar in school/English class apart from punctuation, so they only actually taught me grammar in foreign-language classes... I graduated high school in 2009 so I imagine it's only getting worse lol)

marbuljon:About Latin helping with Romance languages... I found this:

http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.se/2011/02/latin-...

Basically it says "Latin is similar enough in the look of the vocabulary that it helps, but since the grammar is different it can actually mess you up more".

How close can Esperanto copy Japanese sentence structure? I want to try, but it's hard to find "long, difficult sentences full of weird word order" if you know what I mean.

Lexically speaking, yes, Latin is damn useful to increase your vocabulary repertoire in Romance languages. But grammatically speaking it can also help a lot, I'm not talking about declensions but tenses and moods. Spanish and Portuguese have retained the Latin verbal complexity for the most part; it isn’t as complex as that of Latin, though. If you learn Latin first without knowing any other Romance Language Spanish and Portuguese will grammatically be easier, lexically speaking Italian will be faster to learn, too. Romanian is the only Romance language that still uses the 3 grammatical genders of Latin and has declensions, though lesser than Latin. But I’d suggest directly going for Romanian instead of studying Latin.

But given the complexity of Latin you are better off learning another Romance language instead of using Latin as a bridge. Latin is, nevertheless, very useful once you speak a Romance language fluently as Latin increases your passive vocabulary in those languages and you learn the etymology of plenty of words. This is especially useful for those who read literature. Latin can also prove useful to translators thanks to the knowledge of roots to make up new words. But for that you don’t need to study the whole language, just its roots.

orthohawk:
I'm not sure about Hungarian, but a problem with this in Finnish is that the majority of nouns have a different stem for the non-nominative/accusative/partitive cases that needs to be learned for each noun. (kirja>kirjassi, but mies>miehessi)

Oh, but you don't need to learn Finnish or Hungarian as such to grasp the concept of declensions or get used to its morphology. The idea is to use them as a bridge to learn other languages. If you like pain a little bit you can try Euskara, too. Lesser declensions than Hungarian and Finnish but still enough for the virgin mind.

I learnt Latin at school. To be frank, I hardly ever use it in its proper form. The word roots were useful, but that's about it.

Esperanto is like Latin in that it is obviously related to many European languages.

Japanese, uses a lot of suffixes before or after a word, so I supposed that's similar to Esperanto.