But the case for monolinguality in the Esperanto Forums is quite different. If you admit one national language there you would in all fairness have to admit them all - unless you want to accord a special privilege to English - and multilingual contributions would make any thread difficult to follow.

This whole issue arises from the fact that the Esperanto forums are perceived to be not so lively, and just telling people to be more lively in Esperanto won't bring the frequency of contributions upto the level of the English forum.

Could we have a view from the many readers of the English Forum who are still beginners in Esperanto as to whether admitting posts in Esperanto as well would in fact prevent them from following threads.

erinja: But you would never suggest that I post to the Esperanto forum in English, simply because I told you a sad story about how desperately I wanted to participate, but my Esperanto simply wasn't good enough.

I am sorry, but it seems that Sudanglo precisely proponed to do that, partially (concerning the parts one can't write en esperanto), and I support this idea too.

By the way, I don't understand why disregarding the language is far worse than disregarding the topic, as it seems that neurodiversity has been totally forgotten. I think we owe apologies to the initiator of this thread.

I'm not even sure why I've been engaging in this discussion, since the forum rules are something that were agreed upon by the lernu team, and are not under any kind of reevaulation or editing at this point.

It's really extremely simple. It doesn't matter whether you like the rules or not. Either follow them or go and participate in another forum that has different rules. The rules themselves have been fixed this way for a reason. If you disagree with that decision, you're free to find another online community to participate in.

sudanglo:
This whole issue arises from the fact that the Esperanto forums are perceived to be not so lively, and just telling people to be more lively in Esperanto won't bring the frequency of contributions upto the level of the English forum.

That's nonsense. I've no idea where this 'perception' came from... Ok, so there's a small core of people in the English-language forum who like to post hundreds of messages, but generally I don't see this forum as being any better than the Esperanto-language forum here.

Anyhow, most of that small core of contributors here can in fact write perfectly well in Esperanto, so why don't they just transfer any interesting discussions they might have over to the Esperanto forum for the benefit of the wider community here? This is, after all, a site to learn Esperanto, not English.

And some people in this English-language forum post thousands of messages, and yet don't bother to do so in the Esperanto forum. Obviously, this badly effects their progress in the language...

By the way, according to Google Trends, over the past 30 days the average number of posts per day in Esperanto stands at 50.8. And for English? Well that stands at on average 30.7 posts per day.

Chainy:By the way, according to Google Trends, over the past 30 days the average number of posts per day in Esperanto stands at 50.8. And for English? Well that stands at on average 30.7 posts per day.

That's all 8 Esperanto forums compared to the sole English forum. I.E. On average, there are only 6.35 posts in each Esperanto forum daily.

razlem:

Chainy:By the way, according to Google Trends, over the past 30 days the average number of posts per day in Esperanto stands at 50.8. And for English? Well that stands at on average 30.7 posts per day.

That's all 8 Esperanto forums compared to the sole English forum. I.E. On average, there are only 6.35 posts in each Esperanto forum daily.

That's bit of a silly point to make, to be honest. The total number of posts is what counts, not how they are split up into different forums.

If there were 8 English forums, then I suppose that would make an average of only 3.8 posts per day in each one, compared with the 6.35 in each Esperanto forum.

Some people clearly have a distorted view of the activity in the English forum here and it seems to be due to the fact that all the English-language threads are packed into just the one forum. Challenging as it might be, if we add up the figures for all the Esperanto forums here, then it's possible to understand the true picture.

I think the issue is under discussion Erinja because a number of people think the rule about monolingual posting should be changed.

There appears to be a significant non-Anglosaxon constituency who want to post in the English forum, where they find the topics more interesting, and the back and forth flow of argument more lively.

I believe the Lernu statistics support the idea that 25% of Lernu registrees are native speakers of English. Additionally it would be easy to imagine that a further 25% have enough English to read a thread in the English forum.

So we have situation where perhaps half of all registrees can follow the threads in the English language forum. Arguably, this contrasts with the situation for the Esperanto-only forums

If, and I take this argument from you Erinja, posts in Esperanto are too difficult for many to follow, then the vast majority of registrees (beginners) would find the Esperanto Forums too difficult, both for reading and writing in.

Obviously, I wouldn't accept this argument without reservation, but it could explain why the posts in the Esperanto forum might be viewed as less interesting and of lower quality (despite their higher frequency).

Sanctioning a mix of Esperanto and English in the English forum would enhance the active contribution level by bringing in a whole new set of contributors.

With sagacious moderation to prevent Esperanto swamping the English, I imagine that this would NOT be intimidating to the komencantoj-anglalingvanoj - who nevertheless might be discouraged by an Esperanto-only forum.

Further allowing a mix of languages would allow the 25% who are native speakers to take their first steps in actively using their Esperanto, as well as giving them an easy step stimulus in reading Esperanto.

I think that speakers of English should perhaps participate more than we do in the Esperanto-language forums, at least to strengthen the other speakers.

Perhaps we also need to consider the question: why learn any living language, if not to use it? The natural place for that here is the E-language forum.

To learn Esperanto only to be able to have discussions about it in English amounts to treating it like a dead language. Now there's an idea to start off another debate.

Miland:To learn Esperanto only to be able to have discussions about it in English amounts to treating it like a dead language. Now there's an idea to start off another debate.

Do you mean solely in English, or bilingually? I know there are a few bilingual learning forums out there, like people will be speaking between English and Italian. Pretty cool stuff.

Sudanglo:So we have situation where perhaps half of all registrees can follow the threads in the English language forum. Arguably, this contrasts with the situation for the Esperanto-only forums

This is a bit hard to call though since there are many obscure non-English speaking members out there. Since they're obscure, for people like me who use the EO forums not as much as the EN ones, the chances of seeing them are low.

Miland:I think that speakers of English should perhaps participate more than we do in the Esperanto-language forums, at least to strengthen the other speakers.

Perhaps we also need to consider the question: why learn any living language, if not to use it? The natural place for that here is the E-language forum.

To learn Esperanto only to be able to have discussions about it in English amounts to treating it like a dead language. Now there's an idea to start off another debate.

I agree with you, Miland. I really don't understand why certain people are so keen to avoid using Esperanto in their discussions. The only way to learn is to try using it!