Guestblog: continuing learning

I come from a family which values education, even though it has been many years since I got my honours undergraduate degree and then my ACA accountancy qualification. My Father spent his free time during his working years on various degree subjects, just for something to do. I think you either become a specialist in a hobby which you love, or you spread your wings academically and flit from subject to subject.

Last year, I decided it was about time I studied something new, just for the joy of it, and I settled on a 12 week Open University course on the subject of Leonardo da Vinci, a man whose brilliance has always impressed me. Whilst the rest of the world knows him mostly from the handful of paintings he painted (we only know of just over 2 dozen), we aficionados are more impressed by his polymath capabilities: his inventions, his drawings, his engineering skills. And I wanted the chance to learn more about these.

I have to say, the 12 week course was somewhat of a disappointment. I gained a Study Guide and a small book, and had to write two marked assessments. For each, hints to the questions even pointed to the precise pages of the Study Guide I was expected to refer to (but not plagiarise) and then quote as my source. It was very much studying by numbers and not what I had expected from the OU.

Maybe it was because this was a bite-size online course, because I have other friends doing full length courses whose experience is quite different from this. I could have got just as much out of just buying a couple of books, or even borrowing them from the library.

So when that course finished, I decided against trying something else from the OU. Instead, I decided to revisit Esperanto, which I had last come across as a young teenager.

Esperanto is an artificial language, created in the late nineteenth century by a man called Zamenhof. The basic principle is that if everyone learns their native language as their primary language and Esperanto as their second language, everyone in the world can communicate. The jobs of tens of thousands of translators will no longer be needed.

One thing I did discover very quickly, though, is that people are either pro-Esperanto or very anti-Esperanto. The antis dislike the fact that everyone at the worldwide Esperanto conventions speaks Esperanto … err, isn’t that the point?! They seem to think Esperantists are trying to force Esperanto as the world language and to remove national cultures, but as far as I can see that isn’t the case at all. Esperantists use the language to be able to communicate with other nationalities, to be able to share experiences of culture etc. Effectively, it’s like a giant penfriend organisation.

In fact, Esperanto’s last wave of popularity was in the 1980s (when I came across it, as one of its leading lights was a friend of my Father’s) but had been in decline since then. However, it has been rescued by the internet, making it so much easier to find like-minded linguists. Imagine trying to find an Esperanto-speaker before the days of the internet, by small ads! Now, even Wikipedia exists in Esperanto.

I’ve only just started learning it, but I have to say I love it already. Being a manmade language, it has no irregularities at all. The grammar is perfectly simple and the vocabulary is built up from simple roots. There are no masculine and feminine forms, all nouns, verbs and adjectives have simple coherent endings.

Let me give an example. The word Patro means Father. The plural is Patroj (the j is pronounced like a y). The word for Mother is Patrino, and Mothers is Patrinoj. The word for Son is Frato, plural Fratoj.

I’m guessing from this that you can work out the words for Daughter and Daughters

As for verbs, -is suffix is past tense, -as suffix is present tense and –os suffix is future tense. So Patro vendis panon = Father sold bread; Patro vendas panon = Father sells bread; Patro vendos panon = Father will sell bread.

Those are the only three verb endings, for all persons, whether you are talking about Father, I, we or they. I mean, how simple is that?

Because the language is so simply constructed, you can read it within a matter of hours, once you have grasped the grammatical essentials, and I have certainly found that to be the case. It is said that you can be fluent in Esperanto within 20 hours of study, which is far more quickly than for other languages. And many many books have been translated into Esperanto.

Although I have bought a couple of books, I am doing my studying on the internet using http://pacujo.net/cgi-bin/esperanto/course/bonvenon, which offers a free 10-lesson course. Once I’ve done this, I’ll simply get some books to read and join one of the many Esperanto forums to make some online friends. Apparently, there is even a method where Esperantists invite other Esperantists to stay on holiday free of charge as well.

There are also radio broadcasts via the internet. Radio Poland broadcasts in Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio once a week! But the place where this language is really taking off is the Far East. Apparently it is much easier for the Chinese to learn than other western languages because of its simplicity and regularity.

Finally, it is said that if you learn Esperanto, it has a tendency to speed up learning of other languages as well – a person doing six months of Esperanto followed by two years of French will be far ahead in French of someone learning three years of French. I have no idea if this is true, but it sounds intriguing.

I imagine it is because speaking a foreign language fairly fluently (as I do with French and to a lesser degree with German as well) requires you to be able to think in that language. Most non-linguists attempt to translate word by word if learning a new language, but that is not how it works.

On this forum, for example (and this is a wild guess), I’d imagine that English is not the first language of either Suhad or Bian, and yet both use it very well. And I’d be willing to bet that they don’t translate on a word by word basis, but simply think in English when that is what they are writing in. Certainly, that’s what I do with French.

So I’ll wrap it up by asking whether you continue with formal education as adults, whether you speak any foreign languages and whether you have any plans to join me in learning a new language. I suppose it is hoping against hope that I could practise my Esperanto on any like-minded friends …

Morag

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