Berichten: 76
Taal: English
Miland (Profiel tonen) 14 augustus 2011 13:07:07
horsto:.. nowadays nobody cares about fairness.You mean they did 100 years ago?
erinja (Profiel tonen) 14 augustus 2011 13:38:11
Teachers in Hungary make their living teaching Esperanto. No one really gets rich from it, but Esperanto teachers in Hungary charge a lot of money for their services, even though it is possible to learn it for free online.
I believe that around 5000 students take the Esperanto exam in Hungary each year. Lernu.net has 5787 registered users from Hungary (that's for all time, for the last 8 years, not just this year). Therefore most students taking the exam in Hungary are NOT using lernu.net. They are using private tutors, or classes, or a Hungarian website that teaches Esperanto for a fee.
Though SES, in Slovakia, was inexpensive and practically right next door to Hungary, you would think that many Hungarian Esperanto students would take this chance to practice in an immersion environment, right? Wrong. Only a tiny handful of SES students came from Hungary.
It's a strange situation. Obviously Hungarians are opting to pay for their Esperanto, even with a wealth of free options. Browsing through the Hungarian learning website with Google Translate, it looks like one thing that they promote heavily is that they teach to the test, rather than simply teaching the language. Perhaps Hungarian students believe that they won't pass the test if they use free resources, so they use paid resources instead.
Miland (Profiel tonen) 14 augustus 2011 20:19:13
erinja:..they teach to the test..This may be the heart of it - it may be simply a means to an end, of satisfying language requirements for getting a degree, where it might be harder with other languages.
Still, even that may lead to good results some day, if they develop an interest in it some time after graduation.
erinja (Profiel tonen) 14 augustus 2011 20:26:47
darkweasel (Profiel tonen) 14 augustus 2011 20:56:58
Of course you’ll need somebody to create such a course, but I think this would really help.
Solulo (Profiel tonen) 14 augustus 2011 21:49:20
erinja (Profiel tonen) 14 augustus 2011 21:52:21
ceigered (Profiel tonen) 15 augustus 2011 10:24:48
jean-luc:You can make it free by learning it off of things like Wikibooks, skype, livemocha, about.com, or government funded sites etcceigered:I totally disagree. I'm learning german, and it's not easy. And it's not free either, you have to pay for methods/lessons/ressources.
The difficulty of the language isn't what's so important as the fact that people want to learn it and don't realise they can learn it for free (or don't realise how truly easy it is until AFTER they've learnt it).
. I mean, Esperanto's not free either if you choose to learn principally by buying books, going to someraj kursoj, planning trips to congresses (luckily, while our community stays small and focussed, the pasporta servo-style way of travelling is still an option and should remain so for a good while).In fact, it's not hard to imagine there are some people who spend more money to learn Esperanto than there are people who spend money to learn English or German. And technically anyone who learns any language on the net is "paying" (for their internet connection... except maybe in Finland).
Also, I might add I'm reading a croatian grammar guide (for free). But strictly speaking, there's $$$'s worth of face-to-face teacher lessons right in front of me, yet I found it on the net for free. With the right dedication and mood, I could theoretically go learn this hard looking language right away (I'm not gonna though, I'm learning Indonesian (an "easy" language that acts like a natural esperanto) and Japanese (a language with many free resources), and paying $$$ for both in spite of the fact I could be learning them free, but Esperanto's filling up my "free language" mental slot, so I have to study just them
). ceigered (Profiel tonen) 15 augustus 2011 10:46:50
Miland:To be honest, this whole situation has been in motion for a *very* long time, ever since English became a language.horsto:.. nowadays nobody cares about fairness.You mean they did 100 years ago?
Sure there were injustices, but everyone had their own share of them. In the end, due to circumstance, and the collective effort of everyone in the British empire which allowed them to treat half the world as if it belonged to them, which eventually gave birth to nations like the USA, Modern India, Singapore, Australia, South Africa, English was spread across the world in large numbers of speakers (can 400-500 million speakers be classified as being unfair for speaking a language we find native or near-native to us?).
For more parallels there's the romance languages, German, Russian, and Arabic, but only Latin/Romance languages are on the same scale.
I don't think it comes down to unfair (or more unfair than the rest of the world), rather just the way things happened. I mean, if it is unfair, who's to blame? Where did this unfairness begin? With the Indo-European horsemen of central asia? (I'd say before that, but we're already working into prehistory there).
The "international" language/culture/everything can change if anyone wants to put in the effort to spread a new one. The right person/people just need to come along, and do the right things without leaving them half done. Of course, some might find the language change unfair after learning English/Chinese/whatever.
sudanglo (Profiel tonen) 15 augustus 2011 13:42:23