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Jordan as "Dowling Method" for Esperanto?

de Bruso, 2015-novembro-08

Mesaĝoj: 60

Lingvo: English

Vestitor (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-23 23:44:43

Isn't it obvious by reading through 9/10 threads? Let us say, for example, that someone asks a question about a word (al, sin, mem..etc) the answers soon become a tangled warren of grammatical explanations and disagreements about which is the 'right' path to take.

I suspect that there are dozens of beginners who would do better to just read the 6-page grammar summary at the front of Wells's dictionary and then to just read a lot and try and get a 'feel' for usage rather than waffling about 'participle' this and 'perfect tense' that. Same for rote learning of correlatives and lists of affixes without context.

Perhaps there would be fewer and shorter threads..?

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-24 01:52:12

It isn't obvious to me, sorry. Beginner questions seldom lead to a straightforward response. If a beginner comes in with a sentence like "Mi estas iras kun vin", and wants to know whether this is correct, then the beginner needs to know not only that the correct sentence is "Mi iras kun vi", but also that Esperanto seldom makes use of progressive tenses like English does, so although it is certainly possible and correct to say "Mi estas iranta kun vi", simply giving this as the correction to the beginner"s sentence doesn't really tell the whole story.

For beginners who know grammatical vocabulary, it might be faster to explain this with a technical term, and for a beginner without that vocabulary, it might require examples and more detailed explanations, but you seldom really know who you're talking to on the internet, and as you know, the explanation frequently includes both of these variants.

Vestitor (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-24 18:36:43

erinja:It isn't obvious to me, sorry. Beginner questions seldom lead to a straightforward response. If a beginner comes in with a sentence like "Mi estas iras kun vin", and wants to know whether this is correct, then the beginner needs to know not only that the correct sentence is "Mi iras kun vi", but also that Esperanto seldom makes use of progressive tenses like English does...
Isn't it probably best to give a little which is correct and which people can work with, rather than piling on all the options at once? I ask as a question, but I think the answer is: yes.

RiotNrrd (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-24 19:48:06

Vestitor:Isn't it probably best to give a little which is correct and which people can work with, rather than piling on all the options at once?
People strongly educated in grammar would probably say no. Everyone else would probably say yes.

Vestitor (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-24 19:56:59

RiotNrrd:
Vestitor:Isn't it probably best to give a little which is correct and which people can work with, rather than piling on all the options at once?
People strongly educated in grammar would probably say no. Everyone else would probably say yes.
Really? I'm sure you're counting yourself among the former and me among the latter too? Rather transparent.

The matter at hand (if you're reading closely) is that not everyone will master grammar to the level of the usual grammar-nerds, so there has to be a real-world, everyday alternative.

RiotNrrd (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-24 20:14:19

erinja:What exactly do you mean by top-heavy reliance on grammar, and in your mind, what would constitute going lighter on grammar?
Sometimes rules of thumb are better than detailed technical explanations. People who are into the "why" of the ways a language is put together tend to be interested in technical explanations. People who are interested in the "how" are sometimes less so.

There's room for both, but often explanations given to beginners fall into the first camp, and you start seeing talk about cases, moods, tones, perfect tenses, the subjuntive, predicates, blah blah blah. Depending on who you are talking to, those sorts of explanations can discourage people rather than encourage them; it can scare them off, if you will.

This isn't a call to "dumb down" anything. I think technical, detailed grammatical explanations have their place, but sometimes the same information can be provided in practical form in a more simplified manner. For beginners I think that that can be fairly important.

To some extent, I think Bertilo tried to address this in the PMEG by throwing out "normal" grammar terms and defining everything in terms of a-vortoj, o-vortoj, etc.

RiotNrrd (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-24 20:15:19

Vestitor:Really? I'm sure you're counting yourself among the former and me among the latter too?
Actually, no.

Vestitor (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-24 20:58:34

RiotNrrd:
Vestitor:Really? I'm sure you're counting yourself among the former and me among the latter too?
Actually, no.
Yes. My apologies, I read that completely the wrong way.

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-24 22:37:45

I feel like the people answering the question of a beginner don't usually jump to complicated grammar on the first try. The grammatical terms often come out when people on a thread are talking to one another about the beginner's question.

I suspect that private explanations given to a beginner, as part of the tutoring in a course, for example, are not normally as technical as some of the public discussions.

bartlett22183 (Montri la profilon) 2015-novembro-25 19:18:06

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away (early 1960s, semi-rural central USA), I took a beginning high school class in French. Few if any of the students had any experience with any non-English (i.e., non-native) languages. Some of the students simply could not comprehend why (pseudo-)French "Je suis allant" was not a perfectly good equivalent to English "I am going" rather than "Je vais." They were totally oblivious to the fact that different languages are not simply relexifications of each other.

Similarly, Esperanto is not simply relexified English. It is a separate language with its own grammar and, dare I say, "genius." It will do beginners no good to pretend otherwise. They need to be taught the correct ways of saying/writing things from the beginning. Yes, this may not mean piling on grammatical rules with technical vocabulary with which the beginners may not be familiar, but examples and gentle correction can go a long way.

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