erinja:I do have to say that occasionally, a frequent poster disappears from this forum, and later I go to an Esperanto forum for some reason, and see that that person has become a regular there. I'm always glad to see that.

I've shared that experience too. Actually, speaking of which, what am I doing on these English forums so much?

Guess I just like the people here and the ones in the EO forums are unknown to me thus I feel awkward there

geo1963:English is not the second language of almost everyone and it will never be. Most of the world population do not speak and do not understand English - that is the fact. Accept it. If you don't believe it, come to Poland, China, Japan and try to communicate in English, good luck.

No need to sound so bitter
You are certainly right though - although Japan probably isn't the best example (they teach English as the main second language there, and most Japanese probably know a bit of English, that said, they can be as monolingual as English speakers too). But it is true that English has become much like Latin these days in that it has given words (or in some cases rather forcibly implanted them) to many languages.

As a side note, according to Wikipedia, Chinese is actually the most spoken langauge in the world, and that's Mandarin, not the rest of the Chinese languages
Mandarin has something like 1 billion + speakers, Spanish and English have anywhere from 350-500 million speakers, although 1 billion + people know some words or have some knowledge of English.
Arabic, Russian, Indonesian/Malay etc all come in after.

It's important to accept that while English will not be the second language of the entire world, English, and Chinese, are VERY important and very largely spoken across the globe, and are the biggest languages in terms of speakers, thus the best to use if you want to be understood by the most people without learning regional languages (although that's lazy) Chinese however is unique in that most Chinese speakers are concentrated compared to English speakers. (Then again, almost a third of people are East Asian, and many of them have some knowledge of Chinese or are indeed Chinese).

Good luck using Chinese as a bridge language outside of China, though. It would work only in a very few places. Singapore springs to mind.

Of course Classical Chinese gave loanwords to all of the major Asian languages but certainly if you speak modern Mandarin, it won't help you in Japan or Korea.

If you know Chinese writing, that opens a few doors in Japan and a VERY few doors in Korea, but many of the characters have modified meanings from their original Chinese, so this might not help as much as you think.

If I had to choose an Asian bridge language that was useful in more countries, I might go with Japanese. Due to Japanese colonialism during the war, it's not uncommon to find that the older generation speaks some Japanese. And of course the younger generation might speak some English. I get the impression that most people don't study Chinese in Asia, outside of the ethnic Chinese populations.

erinja:If I had to choose an Asian bridge language that was useful in more countries, I might go with Japanese. Due to Japanese colonialism during the war, it's not uncommon to find that the older generation speaks some Japanese.

I would propose Indonesian. It is vastly used as a second language already (though mostly in indonesia itself), and I think it's relatively easy.

Well, there isn't really any Asian "bridge" language other than English. Indonesian/Malay includes Indonesia, Malaysia, and surrounding countries e.g. Singapore (Almost called it "singapura" (Indonesian name for it) ).

Chinese is China, Taiwan, anywhere chinese people have moved (although that does not go outside the chinese community very often, it's just that the sheer numbers of those with Chinese heritage allows the language healthy numbers in foreign countries), Singapore, and Malaysia/Indonesia, although Indonesia not so much due to some recent historical problems which one can read about here.

Japanese is rather limited actually, but it gets bonus points because of the behemothic economy which turns Japan into a pop-culture giant for the region, and thus just how people in the US etc learn Spanish/Italian/French/German for sounding chic, so would one do the same with Japanese in Asia.

Either way, the chinese languages are most useful in Asia, not because of the fact that people are deciding to learn them as foreign languages, but because there's so many people of Chinese descent in Asia. Like Europe though, depending on your country, family origins etc you might speak quite a few languages. Indonesia for example has the "national language" (think of Esperanto had it become the world language for everyone), then the local dialects, related languages, and then unrelated languages (like the Chinese languages).

English is the most neutral though in the region, mostly because the English are no longer there (Australia the exception, that's another regional issue for later, refer to post-colonialism problems in Asia), while the Chinese aren't going anywhere, thus China's more of a "cultural threat" (thus its ban in Indonesia for some years, and ID systems, and many Chinese Indonesians of the era having Indonesian names or straight English names, see priorly mentioned article for that).

So, I feel that English and Chinese are the linguae francae of East Asia, in relative harmony (Chinese having more of a familiar feel to it, while English is the suave foreign language (although Chinese is changing the status quo more and more thanks to China's rise and the US's "stagnation" (bad word choice)). Of course, in the north-west, Russian is the lingua franca, in the south west and all the islamic countries (Malaysia, Indonesia for example) Arabic also serves as ANOTHER lingua franca. Thus the multilingualism of some islamic indonesian/malay families with some chinese heritage or family living in regional areas (Theoretically, one could have Arabic, Indonesian, (some dialect of Chinese), Javanese, (another local language) and English as ones normal language repetoire, although this is ignorant of study loads and who the person actually communicates with).

Anyway, Asia doesn't really see itself as a single entity like Europe sort of does, thus the lack of a true lingua franca covering not only the entire region but all walks of society and all ethnic groups. I finish my stupidly long commenting by stating I'm referring to Lingua Franca in the sense that it exists in the modern world, not in the sense that Esperanto aspires to

geo1963:

warcana:It's true that English is officially the second language of almost everyone (including me).

English is not the second language of almost everyone and it will never be. Most of the world population do not speak and do not understand English - that is the fact. Accept it. If you don't believe it, come to Poland, China, Japan and try to communicate in English, good luck.

blaa blaa blaa. I've been to all those countries (and Poland 6 times) and it's always easy to find English speakers.

warcrane: regardless what excuses people make (oh i love the convo! or im here to help beginners!), they post here because it's easier for them and they're lazy.

Proof: go to the Esperanto forums and see such silly one liner topics like "Do you like hugs" and other trivia (no substance). When people write here they get less mental fatigue and so are able to write longer responses with greater frequency. And so the whole thing is just one self perpetuating snowball. Great signal to send out though that the English forum is the biggest on Lernu! I've typed a few long Esperanto responses before and usually people just ignore/skip over them. Conversely I write a throwaway comment of 5 words and get lots of quotes .etc

Maybe the admins should just combine all 8 Esperanto forums into one big one so a) I don't have to click 8 tabs open and b) it seems more active (due to lots of new posts getting bumped to the top).

Having all those subforums is really useless.

The Esperanto forums were intentionally split up to prevent them from getting too large.

I think it was not expected, when the forums were set up, that the English forum would be so dominant, otherwise the English forum would also have been split into multiple forums.

However if you have comments on the running of the forums, feel free to send them to teamo@lernu.net

I can promise you that the comments will be read but I can't promise a response (depends on how busy the team members are at the time they receive the message, and whether they have much to say in response)

If you total either the thread counts or the message counts for all the Esperanto forums, then this comfortably exceeds the count for the English forums.

However the totals for all the national languages taken together exceed the Esperanto figures. You would expect this given that the site is dedicated to learners of Esperanto, many of whom will be beginners.

The noteworthy thing is the difference between the popularity of the English forum compared to the forums in other languages.

This might stem from either the greater number of English speakers, or that participating in internet forums is more congruent with cultures of the English-speaking countries. I suspect there might be a grain of truth in the latter.

Genjix:
blaa blaa blaa. I've been to all those countries (and Poland 6 times) and it's always easy to find English speakers.

Yes, English speakers, not natives. Hotel staff does not count. Try to speak to people in the street, not find them. Go to some other towns, not only capitals. That is the majority of population. I live in Poland, so which one of us two has better knowledge of the fact in question? I have also been to China - the only place where I could comunicate in English was the airport. On streets you are lost with your English. Fortunately I know Chinese a little, so I could survive.

genjix:go to the Esperanto forums and see such silly one liner topics like "Do you like hugs" and other trivia (no substance).

The subjects people discuss in the national language forums are supposed to have some connection to Esperanto. The Esperanto-language forums, on the other hand, are primarily for practising the language, and so they can be on any topic at all, which need not be particularly interesting or important, so long as Esperanto is being used.

Genjix:Maybe the admins should just combine all 8 Esperanto forums into one big one so a) I don't have to click 8 tabs open and b) it seems more active (due to lots of new posts getting bumped to the top).

Having all those subforums is really useless.

It's much easier to use the RSS links to keep up to date with the forums. I have the Lernu page in Esperanto and if I click on 'Superrigardo' you see a list of all the forums - on this page, at the top you will see in green letters 'En Esperanto' - to the right of this there's a link for the RSS feed.

The 'en Esperanto' RSS feed brings together all the forums in Esperanto, making it much easier to follow everything. Much better than opening all of them up in separate tabs!

But, this is an interesting point - for those that aren't really into RSS, the fact that the Esperanto forums are so divided could cause the number of posts to fall a bit, compared to the unified English forum. But, I'm not necessarily suggesting that they should all be brought together - there are also advantages to having the categories. But if the categories remain, then perhaps it could be made clearer on the 'superrigardo' page about how to use the RSS feeds?