Psittakos, the more of your posts I read the more I see someone who heard learning Esperanto would be easy, found out it's not, and needs it to be the fault of the language rather than a fault of their own. The further this discussion goes the further your arguments go from logic, to the point of ad hominem attacks on everyone who expresses an interest in the language.

Maybe you are just trolling, but I believe you need sympathy much more than an argument. It's okay to fail at learning something or to struggle where others find something easy. Just dust yourself off and move on. Eventually it will come together.

Good luck in future endeavors.

As tempted as I am to go through all his posts and correct them for proper English grammar, I don't want to waste my time.

Mi dezirus al korektas viajn skribojn.
Tamen, pli tedas.

sudanglo:

No language is excessively hard if you wanna learn it, and language difficulty is overrated.

Oh really! Try learning French verbs. Bloody nightmare.

Conveniently I am actually doing French at university (Mais je parle un peu de Français seulement, et le plus grand part de mon français est mauvais), and it's caused me no nightmares so far (actually, I checked out verb conjugation before the rest of the language because I knew it was complicated); it's certainly hard, but surmountable. Like I said - you wanna learn a language, then difficulty shouldn't be an negative point anyway.

Psittakos:I see, I try to remove your baseless faith in your mesiah-language, notice that is but an absurd and decades ago failed experiment, and your angry and insults begings...

"Messiah language", "failed experiment", seriously dude, I don't even care about EO's success, and I'm irritated now. You speak like someone who has delusioned themselves to thinking they're superior to everyone else and somehow more enlightened, and now you've decided to convince yourself of that by picking a fight with a bunch of people with an interest in some petty learn-for-fun-made-up-language, as if you're somehow being a "messiah" yourself.

I'm pretty sure Esperanto is not a language, but a cult. You got your faith, your symbols, your will to impose you project to an apathic world...

Yeah, I'm gonna use your wonderful logic there and assume that all Spaniards are part of a giant cult to try and take over the world with their superior reasoning. Stop chasing after some petty bunny rabbit and calling it a monster.

You try to cheat more people talking about Esperanto is regular and perfect, but when someone show cleary that is not like that, that it haven't any genuinely new thing and the same problems that the real language, as you mean a threat for the cult, then they attack, they have no more arguments, so just can attack.

Some people are like that, you'll find them anywhere and everywhere. Bonne chance à toi calling every society in the world a cult for protecting whatever useless ideals they've got which don't add up.

I'll retract myself I call you masters, in the meanwhile you're just frickingers...

I'm not sure which is lower - calling an Esperantist your master on the basis that they speak Esperanto, or calling an Esperantist a "frickinger" on the basis that they speak Esperanto.

Sorry for acting like a punk back to you man, but you need to realise how over the top and dramatic this all looks. Ultimately, we can all apologise and stop this silly show of force over the silliest thing to fight over ever, or this sour attitude can just stick. Ultimately, I don't care eitherway, since I'm just some normal (even if I know some esperanto) university student living out my care free life, and you're some normal guy living in some far off country picking a fight with the local knitting club. You're not gonna fend off the biting grannies by deriding them further.

philodice:Mi dezirus al korektas viajn skribojn. Tamen, pli tedas.

Suggested correction: Plaĉus al mi korekti viajn skribaĵojn, tamen, tio tedus min.

mahen:
The feminine / masculine issue is definitely far from being the most prominent one though, except for really rare words. (I guess that they were very uncommon words, in the game you mentioned).

Well, for native speakers grammatical gender is rarely a big issue, in any language!

However for being understood, especially in French, it's not a big issue. When I ordered *un eau minéral gazeux instead of une eau minérale gazeuse I was absolutely well understood.

In German there could actually be misunderstandings because the same article that's used for the feminine, die, is also used for the plural, and there are masculine/neuter words that don't change in their plural form except for the article. Thus, if a foreigner mistakes the neuter word Fenster (window) as feminine, they'll ask me to shut one window as schließ bitte die Fenster which I would understand as a (grammatically correct) plural - that is, I'd understand that I am supposed to shut more than one window.

French spelling may be comparably easy to foreigners because they learn the written and spoken form of a word at the same time. It's just a problem if things like the conjugation of verbs are exercised mostly orally - this once made me write *je peut instead of je peux (I can) on an exam!

I can't remember now the words in the game show question. It was at least a year ago. But I don't recall that they were that obscure. I also have seen plenty of quiz questions on French TV on other aspects of French, conjugation, plurals and so on.

All bizarre from an English point of view, as the only language questions we are likely to have on our TV Game Shows are about the meaning of words or idioms - not about grammar. And these question would be the easy ones, not the ones that could win you big money.

Hi Mahen, can I just say that I think your French TV is pretty good. I often watch in preference to the UK channels. The Maigrets - they're repeating them on France 2 now - are superb, better I think than our Poirots or Miss Marples or Midsomer Murders.

A propos, pas mal ton anglais. Beaucoup plus mieux que mon français.

Psittakos:I see, I try to remove your baseless faith in your mesiah-language, notice that is but an absurd and decades ago failed experiment, and your angry and insults begings...

I'm pretty sure Esperanto is not a language, but a cult. You got your faith, your symbols, your will to impose you project to an apathic world...

You try to cheat more people talking about Esperanto is regular and perfect, but when someone show cleary that is not like that, that it haven't any genuinely new thing and the same problems that the real language, as you mean a threat for the cult, then they attack, they have no more arguments, so just can attack.

OK, If you can admit all that is pointless, follow waste your time... I see here people only is accepted if follow the only nerdy-geeky-freeky idea... When people from over the world end up living together in peace thanks to Esperanto, I'll retract myself I call you masters, in the meanwhile you're just frickingers...

Wow. You've been talking to Chris Culver, haven't you?

Labeling something a "cult" is meant to place a negative stigma upon the thing labeled in order to stifle and prevent any rational and reasonable discussion and to elicit irrational emotionally-loaded reactions, which is exactly what trolls need. [So, let's answer him in a rational and calm manner.]

The negative stigma that surrounds the word "cult" is due to this wisdom of repugnance (i.e., the yuck factor). We think (at least, from the popular perspective) of "cults" as intrinsically evil or harmful, and that maybe true (Aum Shinrikyo, for instance), but the original meaning of the word was of a set of ritual practices and under this definition, many things and ideas we take for granted are in fact cultic, like nationalism or the Scouting Movement. Now, his purposes are very clear from the start, picking a fight in order to elicit emotional and negative comments and using these to tarnish E-o and its speakers and putting them into public ridicule and ignominy. Putting the "cult" label for the purpose of deterring people from engaging into any serious investigation and reasonable discussion about Esperanto or any other matter is the hallmark of intellectual cowardice.

As to his questions, it is pretty obvious that he has a very shallow knowledge of Esperanto grammar, most especially, of Esperanto morphology. For instance, he is attacking Esperanto morphology just because "libero" didn't appeared in his three dictionaries?! That is very ridiculous! He should at least read de Saussure's book on Esperanto morphology, or the Akademio's 1967 decision regarding the word-building system before saying anything at all! Couturat never attacked E-o and its morphology just because a word didn't appear in his copy of the Fundamento, no. He attacked E-o because he studied E-o grammar and he found the rules on morphology insufficient and vague, and he at least proposed an alternative (the principle of reversibility). I cannot say the same of Psittakos. He is attacking something he does not fully know.

My reasons for learning Esperanto is because I like the idea behind it, my partner is learning it also and we enjoy speaking to each other. I have also made friends with people who don't even speak English at all. I also feel that English (although my mother tongue) has eliminated many other native languages from other cultures. I think one of Esperanto's goal is to stop this, so that we each keep our native tongue but speak esperanto to those who don't share it without, forcing either party to speak each others native tongue. But that is just my 2 cents

qwertz:
No, French will survive, too. The most officals EC/EU documents are translated without any special requests to English and French. Viva la Grand Nation Apart that, there is still a big Spanish only area in South-America. Not to forget Asia and Middle-East.

Vive la grand nation, mon ami!
I wonder how that translates to Esperanto... Vivu la granda nacio!

And yes, the push to language monolingualism would have to involve the merger of standardised and simplified variants of Chinese, English, Spanish and French among others (likely German, Russian, and various languages in India for example), to a language that can't be predictable. Who knows, that language might still be called "English", but if monolingualism were to occur there's no way the rest of the world's languages will just die, it's far more likely and realistic for them to merge together under the radar, like a sort of international colloquial languages like the stuff we find on the net....

EDIT: Hein?! Qwertz's message... disappeared... O_O Or my post ended up being sent into the wrong thread... I'm confused!