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From: dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter)
Subject: Re: Languages in the EC
Message-ID: <D46CMB.G5p@cwi.nl>
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Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
References: <D3wzqz.F5A@cwi.nl> <HINSENK.95Feb13143546@cyclone.ERE.UMontreal.CA> <D44Hu8.IMp@cwi.nl>
Date: Sat, 18 Feb 1995 02:37:22 GMT
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In article <D44Hu8.IMp@cwi.nl> dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter) writes:
 > Note that there are places where Esperanto would come in as third language
 > as the earliest possible, the first and second being the native language
 > and the nations language respectively.  (There are places where schools do
 > something with a minority language, like Frisian in Frisia.)

A follow-up to my own message, there is more to this than minority languages
only.  I just did a survey over the children in the class of my 12 year
old daughter (turned 12 a week ago).  There are 21 children in that class,
13 of them have Dutch as native language.  The other 8 speak at home another
language, sometimes depending on whether they talk to their father or their
mother.  The distribution is as follows:
    Turkish
    Spanish
    French/Moroccan Arabic
    German/English
    Hungarian/German
    Ethiopian
    English
    English/Ghanese (I do not know exactly which language).
Nearly all of them are now pretty fluent in Dutch and their abilities in
English (which they are tought the last 1.5 year) is also pretty good,
regarding the time they have been exposed to it.  Moreover, there are a
few children of Antillian and Surinam descent that have some working
knowledge of Papiamento or Sranang.  And note that quite a few of them
have only 2 years or less of Dutch exposure.

What I wish to say is that the ability of a child at that age to acquire
a working knowledge of a language is pretty good.  This ability decreases
steeply when you get older.  Probably that is the reason that my French
is better than my German (although German is much closed to Dutch than
French).  I started with French when I was 10, with German when I was 13,
moreover, I did use my French from about that time (in Walloon Belgium)
while I used my German much later, later in effect than my contortion of
Italian which proved to be good enough to communicate with some people in
former Yugoslavia.

So I do not readily buy the argument that learning Esperanto initially
would improve the possibilities to learn other foreign languages later
as well.  The best way to learn a language is to practize.  Currently
English offers many more opportunities to practize than Esperanto.

Note: the distribution of native languages at school is not atypical
for a school in Amsterdam.  I have no problem with it at all.  My
nephew learned the equivalent of "happy birthday to you" in about 30
languages during primary school.  Good enough to make an initial
contact in some far-away place.
-- 
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj  amsterdam, nederland, +31205924098
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn  amsterdam, nederland; e-mail: dik@cwi.nl
