[bctnry]

> Your time spent learning Esperanto may have actually created a solid foundation to learning Mandarin, if that's what you desire to learn!

As a native Mandarin speaker who also knows Esperanto I can tell you this is almost 100% (if not exactly 100%) not the case. If learning Esperanto gives you motivation to learn more, maybe; but the two languages are way too different that it wouldn't help much.

[Nadya]

Your case is not only different from the one I'm claiming it helps (you already spoke Mandarin natively) but also I'm specifically claiming it helps monolinguals who are learning their first non-native language. So unless you went Mandarin --> Esperanto --> English and found Esperanto didn't help you learn English at all then I what I said doesn't apply to you. If you were either bilingual before learning Esperanto I don't think it'd have been very useful as a "diving board" to learning another language as you've already have the knowledge of speaking two languages. And I don't wish to make any assumptions, but if you've been bilingual your entire life I don't think you can even accurately imagine what it is like to be monolingual. Bilinguals have an easier time learning a third language than monolinguals have learning a second [0] [1] [2].

I personally give credit to 3 months of learning Esperanto for helping me get over a huge hurdle in my Japanese studies (after 2 years of studying). Not because Esperanto and Japanese have anything in common - but because learning certain grammatical structures in Esperanto helped the Japanese equivalents finally "click" after I had been struggling with learning them for so long. This doesn't seem to be an uncommon occurrence within the Esperanto community (for those with non-Esperanto target languages). The plural of anecdotes is of course not "data" but the studies (however criticized) and experiences of countless people (including myself) all point to it helping.

I hear plenty of stories from people who've never bothered to learn it saying they won't learn it because they'd rather learn their target language instead. It's difficult to even find a story from someone who's learned it and claims it didn't help them at all in learning a non-Esperanto target language. I've tried Googling around a bit - I can only ever find people who shit on conlangs as a concept and refuse to learn one.

The longest and hardest thing when learning a language is learning how to learn a language and that's what I personally believe Esperanto (or any conlang really) helps with. I would only ever personally recommend a brief stint (no more than a month or two) of Esperanto for monolinguals.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3583091/#b22-ce...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19648456

[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110201110915.h...

[KhoomeiK]

Some of what you're saying (knowing one language in general helps you learn to learn other languages) is true, but Japanese and Chinese are so grammatically different that the way structures in Esperanto map to Japanese just doesn't hold the same for Chinese. Mandarin is a highly analytical language (words don't inflect or conjugate depending on grammatical function or context: "He has one dog" "They has two dog") while Japanese is synthetic ("He has one dog "They have two dogs), meaning the latter is far closer to most European languages grammatically than either is to Chinese.

[munmaek]

That's not what they're talking about at all. They're talking about learning how to learn a language. Learning a second language gives you meta insight into language learning, which makes it far easier to move onto a third language.

For example, I studied German in college. I never really progressed in it that much, but learning how to learn made learning Korean significantly easier for me. It happens that esperanto can be useful for this as it doesn't have all the small idiosyncrasies and exceptions that real languages have.

[KhoomeiK]

>That's not what they're talking about at all. They're talking about learning how to learn a language.

Huh? I acknowledged that at the start of my comment:

>Some of what you're saying (knowing one language in general helps you learn to learn other languages) is true

[firethief]

Japanese actually is just like Mandarin in your example. Neither verbs nor typical nouns are inflected for number.

[KhoomeiK]

That's true. But there's an expansive politeness and tense inflection system as well as topic and object markers.

[bctnry]

It's not Esperanto itself that works, it's the basic linguistics throughout the learning process, i.e. it's the idea of "how languages work (in their own way)" that has the effect. Facts about Esperanto per se do not help. Take a linguistic course and you'll get pretty much the same effect.

Or should I say, imagine Standard Basque: as an independent language, people might have a better time learning Basque because at least they uses latin alphabets.

Oh, and did i mention how closely related Esperanto and English are that your "Chinese -> Esperanto -> English" claim does not suffice at all? :)

Oh, and don't forget you yourself are actually becoming one of the reasons why people "shit on conlang" - close-to-irrational fanboys :)

[Nadya]

>It's not Esperanto itself that works...

I made sure to mention that I believe any conlang would suffice. Conlangs are easier to learn than natural languages as that's largely the very reason they are constructed in the first place, outside of fantasy conlangs which are constructed for...well... fantasy reasons. So you're right, it's not Esperanto itself.

>Or should I say, imagine Standard Basque: as an independent language, people might have a better time learning Basque because at least they uses latin alphabets.

Literally any second language in the entire world would help learn a third language as at that point you have the advantages of being bilingual learning a third langauge instead of monolingual learning a second language. Again, the point of a conlang is finding a language you can learn to an intermediate level at a very quick pace compared to natural languages. There's no weird quirks and dozens if not hundreds of grammatical exceptions due to etymological reasons. You never have to wonder why it is "mouse" and "mice" and "house" and "houses" instead of "hice".

>Oh, and don't forget you yourself are actually becoming one of the reasons why people "shit on conlang" - close-to-irrational fanboys :)

Rational would imply I don't have any logical reasons behind my support of conlangs. Personal experience and countless shared experiences of others who had similar experiences to mine as well as studies showing the benefits makes me more inclined to believe that Esperanto, even a brief stint with it, helps. Is it irrational to believe that morning stretches and daily meditation is good for one's health?

You never confirmed if you were raised bilingually. It matters a lot in regards to what I am talking about.

[bctnry]

> You never confirmed if you were raised bilingually. It matters a lot in regards to what I am talking about.

Sorry to break your imagination but I'm not :)

What I'm trying to say is:

1. What is working is not Esperanto per se.

2. Even if you know English and Esperanto, Chinese will (even if it became somewhat easier for you as you might have claimed) still be a heck to learn (e.g. good ol' "counting words"), because they're so different that the even if the "solid foundation" helps it won't help much. That's why I'm bringing up Basque - I myself have trouble learning Basque even if this is the 4th language I have tried to learn.

As for the rational part, I don't know if you know programming but I'm gonna take programming as an example: imagine someone has only learnt C. Now, could claiming "learning Go will help you form a solid foundation about Haskell!" ever be considered rational? I really don't think it should.

[Nadya]

>1. What is working is not Esperanto per se.

I've fully agreed with you on this point several times now so to try and make it clear. I fully agree with this point. Again.

>2. Even if you know English and Esperanto, Chinese will (even if it became somewhat easier for you as you might have claimed) still be a heck to learn (e.g. good ol' "counting words"), because they're so different that the even if the "solid foundation" helps it won't help much. That's why I'm bringing up Basque - I myself have trouble learning Basque even if this is the 4th language I have tried to learn.

Japanese isn't that far from the tree in terms of difficulty for an English speaker than Mandarin. Japanese shares the concept of counting words. Due to where Japanese Kanji come from (Chinese Hanzi), some even share the same meaning. 三回 means the same thing in Mandarin as it does Japanese as does the counter 首 for poems. Chinese has a more similar word order to English than Japanese does, a simple grammar, and one reading per Hanzi. Sheng1 (生) has 13 different ways it can be read in Japanese. I don't find the argument that, unlike Japanese, Chinese is so uniquely difficult that Esperanto wouldn't help like it did for me learning Japanese. But my ship has already sailed and I'll never be able to put that theory to the test because I've already been tainted with learning how to learn a language.

>As for the rational part, I don't know if you know programming but I'm gonna take programming as an example: imagine someone has only learnt C. Now, could claiming "learning Go will help you form a solid foundation about Haskell!" ever be considered rational? I really don't think it should.

Programming is a great example because there is a fundamental difference in people who understand programming and people who have learned a specific syntax for a given language. That difference is to learn a (programming) language and learning how to learn a (programming) language.

Do you think someone who knows C would learn Haskell faster than someone who has no prior programming experience? Likewise, would you recommend someone's first programming language to be Dyalog or an esoteric language like Brainfuck or would you recommend something more simple like Python or Java for them to grasp some fundamentals first?

Learning how to learn is the single most difficult step to learning anything. While learning to learn it is important to have a tool that isn't constantly getting in your way and making learning difficult.

That's not to say learning becomes effortless. Just because you speak three languages doesn't mean you'll immediately assimilate a fourth language instantaneously and without any effort. But I'd be willing to bet you're having a considerably easier time learning Basque as a fourth language than most people would as a second language.

[Dylan16807]

> Conlangs are easier to learn than natural languages as that's largely the very reason they are constructed in the first place, outside of fantasy conlangs

Even excluding fantasy languages, I'd bet that "I want my own" and "I want X cool feature" absolutely dwarf "I want a language that's easier to learn".

[KhoomeiK]

Yeah, they probably meant specifically auxlangs

[Nadya]

I did. Thank you for taking the charitable interpretation, as the principle of charity has long been buried.