Mesaĝoj: 11
Lingvo: English
surfingnirvana (Montri la profilon) 2006-septembro-29 12:08:22
If Esperanto is meant to be a language nobody speaks natively, doesn't this contradict one of it's biggest reasons?
Also...why teach your child Esperanto? Why not a language with a large population. If you were to teach them Esperanto, why not as a second language? I just don't think that this makes sense.
-Alex
Rope (Montri la profilon) 2006-septembro-29 15:05:02
surfingnirvana:I hear that many people like the idea of a child learning Esperanto as their first language. Personally, I don't understand this.
If Esperanto is meant to be a language nobody speaks natively, doesn't this contradict one of it's biggest reasons?
Also...why teach your child Esperanto? Why not a language with a large population. If you were to teach them Esperanto, why not as a second language? I just don't think that this makes sense.
I think it would make a child interested in learning more languages.
Esperanto has not been adopted by a country so is not native in that respect. However if the parents of a child spoke diferent languages as well as Esperanto the child would be tri-lingual, so would be able to comunicate in Eo and possibly two natural languages.
I do think that when people say a child is a native speaker of Eo, they refur to the child growing with the language from birth and would acquire Eo as they would their parents native languages.
Well thats a newbies oppinion.
-Alex
Rope (Montri la profilon) 2006-septembro-29 15:06:30
Shawna (Montri la profilon) 2006-septembro-29 16:25:34
And I've read that parents who speak more than one language should speak all their languages to their infants, so they grow up with it. I've known quite a few people whose parents did that, and they were bi- or tri- lingual at a very early age.
Plus, if a child learns both their native language and Esperanto young, it puts them at an advantage in learning other languages, even unrelated languages.
One of my friends in elementary school, because of his parents, spoke English, Hungarian, and German. When he got to junior high, he took French, and picked it up very fast, winning awards at contests because of how good he spoke. I was figuring he'd be bad at it because of the languages he already spoke, but he was better.
Shawna
Lunombrulino (Montri la profilon) 2006-septembro-29 17:29:01
Two people meet at the junulara kongreso. He speaks language A, she speaks language B, and the only common language between them is Esperanto. (I have heard the language jokingly referred to as "Edz-peranto.")
They fall in love, get married, have kids.
The kids learn language A from his relatives, language B from hers, and Esperanto around the house.
What solution would you have suggested, Surfing?
erinja (Montri la profilon) 2006-septembro-29 21:06:42
Lunombrulino:This is very true.
They fall in love, get married, have kids.
The kids learn language A from his relatives, language B from hers, and Esperanto around the house.
What solution would you have suggested, Surfing?
When I first met a "denaskulo" (lit. from-birth-person - someone who is a "native" speaker), I was a little nervous that they were going to talk way better than me.
But then I realized that I could speak Esperanto as well as any of them, grammatically speaking. They had more vocabulary and stuff but grammar-wise I think I was just as good. And when I once visited an Esperanto-speaking family who shall remain nameless, I was struck by the fact that one of the parents didn't speak with very good grammar, and with a horrible accent. This brings me to point two - the denaskulo is only as good as their parents. They do not grow up in a wider Esperanto culture in most cases, and they are mostly influenced by their parents, and in addition, many kids don't want to be the "weird one" who speaks something weird with their parents, so they fall out of speaking it in their school years. To quote one denaskulo I met, who was in her 20's - "I probably spoke Esperanto better at 5 than I do now". Not to say that all parents of denaskuloj speak horribly, and not to say that all denaskuloj forget their Esperanto and become bad speakers. But I just want to remind everyone that the advantage that the denaskuloj have isn't as big as you might imagine.
T0dd (Montri la profilon) 2006-septembro-30 01:15:41
For some reason, I felt funny about this. It felt to me like doing an "experiment" with my daughter, not for her benefit, but for mine, in some weird way. I can't really justify this feeling. Parents, after all, make all sorts of decisions for their kids. But I just decided it wasn't something I wanted to do. I figured, if she's interested when she gets older, there will be plenty of opportunities to learn and practice it.
She'll be 23 in a few months. She has studied French, and Irish, and Chinese. She is respectful of my interest in Esperanto, but doesn't share it. And my wife, after that one course, was not motivated to continue studying Esperanto. My son, who came later, is a teenager now and is also not the least bit interested. So in this family, it's strictly my interest. This has been an obstacle, in some ways, but I'm comfortable with the idea that Esperanto should be learned because one is drawn to it.
gxosefo (Montri la profilon) 2006-septembro-30 13:45:09
and if two parents speak two different languages, i think that Esperanto is a great fast solution. they can teach their child Esperanto in addition to whichever language they want. i wouldn't teach three languages to a child, that might become confusing to them...
vidu mian blogon!
http://web.mac.com/teisenmann/iWeb/Esperantanaso/B...
so (Montri la profilon) 2006-oktobro-18 12:23:54
Here is what made us change our mind:
- Esperanto is the language we use when we speak with each other, and in that way the most natural language for us to use in our family.
- My husband doesn't speak my mothertongue and we live in "his" country, so if he would speak "his" language to our daughter it would be very dominant (coming from both environment and the father) compared to my mothertongue and we heard from other families in similar situations that the result could be only passive knowledge of my mothertongue.
- When I was a little girl I was a bit angry with my father because he didn't teach me Esperanto at very early age, although I now think that it was useful experience to learn it on my own.
So I still speak mainly Esperanto with my husband, he speaks Esperanto even with our daughter, and I speak my mother tongue with her. She'll soon be 2 years old and she started distingushing both languages and the language of the environment, beside understanding them very well.
It might be a bit unfair, as she has some advantage compared with people who didn't learn Esperanto natively, but as the others already did point out, the advantage is not so big as she'll have to make active efforts to keep her Esperanto alive and usable if she wants to overcome the mistakes we unevitably transfer to her and use it even in new situations and environments.
Senlando (Montri la profilon) 2006-novembro-02 10:14:49
my family always spoke to each other in english but spoke to everone else in mandarin (since taiwan is a mandarin speaking country).
but when my family went to canada or the usa for visits, by default we mostly spoke mandarin. i know this sounds weird but i think it was good because wherever we went we allways had a "family language". where only my family could understand. kindof a like a privet language. it helped us feel united even though we were out of our enviroment.
now that i live with my brother in canada, 40% of what we say to each other is in mandarin both outside and inside.
the reson why i say this is because i believe that it is a great thing to teach your kids a language other then the one used in the country you live in. especially esperanto since it is so easy to learn. it's not going to waste your childrens time to learn a less popular language. every language is valuable, they help u think differantly in ways that monolinguo people can't understand, and they give u a sence of unity among the people who speak it. so if u dicide not to teach your children esperanto, teach them somthing else. but make sure u give them a chance to learn a second language early in thire life.