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From: elna@netcom.com (Esperanto League N America)
Subject: Re: Esperanto as a stepping stone?
Message-ID: <elnaD22xoI.Hwz@netcom.com>
Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
References: <HCANNON.118.2F0F0796@macalstr.edu>
Date: Sun, 8 Jan 1995 09:14:42 GMT
Lines: 55

HCANNON@macalstr.edu writes in a recent posting (reference <HCANNON.118.2F0F0796@macalstr.edu>):
>I've heard claims - though, I admit I haven't fully read all the posts about 
>Esperanto here - that Esperanto is heavily biased in favor of European 
>languages.  If this is true, and if it's also true that if one already knows, 
>say, a Romance language such as French it is then easier to learn another 
>Romance language such as Spanish than it would be if you didn't already have 
>the Romance language background, then would it be true that learning Esperanto 
>would be helpful in aquiring other languages?
>
>
This is quite true for students from within the Indo-European family of 
languages, and truer still for those from other language backgrounds.

Consider a Chinese person who wishes to learn a European language, say 
French or English. She is introduced to the concept of an alphabet, a
collection of several dozen symbols which allegedly reflect the 
pronunciation of the words which make up the language. This is of course
quite novel, because Chinese ideograms give no clue to the sound of the 
word; the sound of each symbol must be memorized individually. But rather
soon this correlation between spelling and pronunciation breaks down, what
with "silent letters" and multiple potential transliterations of a given
sound, etc. In short orthographic impurity of national languages causes
confusion.    Then there is the business of irregular plurals, exceptions
to verb patterns, etc. all the way through the lovely eccentricities of the
target language.  This all presents a fuzzy picture of the fundamental
concepts which underlie most European languages.

If the same Chinese student were to preface her study of French or English
with a basic course in Esperanto, she would gain a simple, regular framework
of the structure of European (dare I say Indo-European?) languages which
would function well as a skeleton on which to hang the flesh and fat of any
national language from that family. 

This clarity of necessity bears fruit.
And the bonus is that the student learns a third language in the process!
Several studies have been done which demonstrate that a group of students
learn a target language faster if they first take some time to study 
Esperanto. Forr example, two classes of German students set about to learn
French-- one group spent five years on French, the other spent one year on
Esperanto and four on French. The second group learned more French, and had 
also learned Esperanto!

Any student of language can recall the frustration inherent in the process
of memorising the classes of verbs, the different conjugations within those
classes, the exceptions.... And so on for all the irregularities. Think of
the levels of positive feedback which await the student of a planned 
language which is rationally designed to avoid irregularities!  
>
I submit that the best preparation for the successful study of any language
is a happy and rewarding introduction to the study of languages. Esperanto
provides this by its nature.

Miko Formiko
<MSloper@aol.com>  

