ceigered:@ riotnrrd - then again, school based language learning is notoriously horrible.

Here in the U.S., this is a common belief as well. But I think that if you really want to learn the language, then you will get much more out of your school courses than Jack or Jill, who just want to pass and/or get it over with.

In your experience, have many friends or people you know been enthusiastic and motivated to learn the language they were being taught in high school, only to be left with little to no knowledge at the end of the semester/year?

And another (serious, not snarky) question: Are people expecting the classroom to provide all the training they need to become competent in the language? If so, is that reasonable? I would think that extra-curricular study (even beyond homework assignments) would be necessary for proficiency to be achieved.

Also, it should be noted that teachers can't always focus their energy on the most gifted student(s), so the pace of learning may sometimes be slow and the detail of information given not so great. What do you think?

5KFunRun:Here in the U.S., this is a common belief as well. But I think that if you really want to learn the language, then you will get much more out of your school courses than Jack or Jill, who just want to pass and/or get it over with.

True - however even then, the average school teacher doesn't really need to have done any linguistics before, let alone even having learnt the language, which doesn't help.

In your experience, have many friends or people you know been enthusiastic and motivated to learn the language they were being taught in high school, only to be left with little to no knowledge at the end of the semester/year?

About 30% of the people I went to school with were like this - the German students seemed to retain a bit more of their language skills thanks to an overseas exchange program.

Are people expecting the classroom to provide all the training they need to become competent in the language? If so, is that reasonable? I would think that extra-curricular study (even beyond homework assignments) would be necessary for proficiency to be achieved.

The extra curricular things do help, but even then, you should be able to get a good grasp of a language within class time alone. In fact, I think homework assignments are pretty useless - what you need is to get people using the language in class. One of the greatest ways to learn a language in class that I've found is to use all the vocabulary we learn in absurd and humourous ways (I won't replicate any examples here because they're a bit too adult ). Homework just turns the whole learning process into stress.

Also, it should be noted that teachers can't always focus their energy on the most gifted student(s), so the pace of learning may sometimes be slow and the detail of information given not so great. What do you think?

Haha, this reminds me of my linguistics cognate topic class - it takes us two lectures per week just to get through a single page of our class reader

I agree that it's obscenely easy to get a good grade without actually learning anything in a school language class. I also agree that there should be more foreign-language discussion in said foreign-language class.

But don't knock the homework! To me, it's essential, particularly in a university-level course, when you're often not physically in the class every day. The homework gives you day to day contact with the language, and practice with the written form of the language. This serves you well in the future, when you actually know the correct forms to use, rather than relying on muddled pronunciation to let everyone simply assume you used the right form Learning by rote is underrated, especially when it comes to trying to beat grammatical endings into your head!

An enlightening post on the importance of rote learning in mastering a foreign language can be found at the excellent blog, Ask A Korean. It has excellent advice on strategies for mastering a language (and some very good comments from readers, also worth reading)

Oh, sorry, I thought we were talking about homework like essays etc, not rote learning - yes, that stuff is good

314 Rory:It seems to me like there are two kinds of people who learn Esperanto. Those that love languages and are gifted at them. Then there are those like me, who are truly awful at them, but are determined to break out of the confines of their own language. [...] Anyone else out there learning Esperanto because you failed in your attempts to any other language?

I took German for two years in highschool and was at the top of my class. I loved that class, worked hard at it, really wanted to speak it well, but... I never got to where I could listen to spoken German and understand more than one word out of a hundred. I grasped the grammatical concepts and all, but gaining a practical working knowledge of that language seemed impossible.

It took me maybe six weeks of diligent study of Esperanto to surpass the level I'd achieved after two years of diligent study of German.

As long there is no lively esperanto culture onsite I'm learning esperanto for propaedeutic reasons. In detail that means for me to motivate myself to improve my english language skills. To get esperanto communication skills is a nice "side effect" for me. I'm not very good in learning languages but I need English communication skills for my profession.

I have found that even if a language class is taught 100% in the target language, you can end up with a false idea of your comprehension of a language. I always understood almost 100% of what my Italian teacher was saying. At the same time, when I actually went to Italy, I could understand only a small percentage of what people said. My teacher was a native-born Italian, from a region not far from where I was visiting in Italy, so dialect wasn't an issue. But she used easier words and spoke more clearly than Italians who weren't speaking for an audience of foreigners, and the difference in comprehension was massive.

Evildela:

ESPERANTO IS JUST ENGLISH WITH Os!

Doesn’t seem like it to me, it would be more correct to say "Esperanto is just French with Os" as there’s more French words then English in Esperanto...

Funny you say so. French speakers (when they don't know anything about Spanish) tend to think that Esperanto is some kind of Spanish language (because of the -os, -o, -a, -as and so on).
But they certainly don't see it as some kind of French.

custinne:

Evildela:

ESPERANTO IS JUST ENGLISH WITH Os!

Doesn’t seem like it to me, it would be more correct to say "Esperanto is just French with Os" as there’s more French words then English in Esperanto...

Funny you say so. French speakers (when they don't know anything about Spanish) tend to think that Esperanto is some kind of Spanish language (because of the -os, -o, -a, -as and so on).
But they certainly don't see it as some kind of French.

And what say spanish people: "some kind of portuguese?"

custinne:

Evildela:

ESPERANTO IS JUST ENGLISH WITH Os!

Doesn’t seem like it to me, it would be more correct to say "Esperanto is just French with Os" as there’s more French words then English in Esperanto...

Funny you say so. French speakers (when they don't know anything about Spanish) tend to think that Esperanto is some kind of Spanish language (because of the -os, -o, -a, -as and so on).
But they certainly don't see it as some kind of French.

Not only French speakers. Even when I, years ago, long before I knew Esperanto, saw at an image description page at Wikimedia Commons something like:
La bildo estis kopiita de wikipedia:en. La originala priskribo estis:
I thought this was Spanish. It just looked like it.