erinja: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!

Ditto. It sometimes drives me a little insane that people in my Spanish class forget anything about the language as soon as they leave the classroom.

erinja: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.

That is very true for nearly ever language I believe. But I'm a native English speaker, and English is often spoken much slower than other languages.

I just hope native Spanish speakers don't speak Esperanto with machine gun speed

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.

I'm basing my assessment on an Esperanto Etymological dictionary, it sates that French had the biggest vocabulary influence on Esperanto. But basically that’s the whole point of Esperanto; it represents no one particular language. However to be honest, when I first saw Esperanto I assumed it to be Spanish, and totally ignored it for a few months based on this assumption… all because of its Spanish sounding name.

Evildela:

custinne:

Evildela:[quote/quote]Doesn’t seem like it to me, it would be more correct to say "Esperanto is just French with Os"

I'm basing my assessment on an Esperanto Etymological dictionary, it sates that French had the biggest vocabulary influence on Esperanto.

It's perfectly correct and I already knew that. I just wanted to point out the fact that it's not a French language at all, despite of the vocabulary. But you'll agree, I guess.
May I know which dictionary you use? Mine doesn't have etymological information (which is quite frustrating sometimes).

custinne:May I know which dictionary you use? Mine doesn't have etymological information (which is quite frustrating sometimes).

Heres the online Etymology dictionary I use, though it doesn’t include all Esperanto’s roots: http://Etymological Dictionary
Also Wikipedia goes into some detail on the subject as well: Wiki Link

Also I can't remember where, but I found an article on the topic stating that 60% of Esperanto's roots can be found within French.

Oh and I understand your position, I was mainly replying to the guy who implied Esperanto was English with O's. Basically I was stating that if anyone wanted to relate Esperanto to any particular language that based off its vocabulary French would be its closest look-alike.

Evildela:
Heres the online Etymology dictionary I use, though it doesn’t include all Esperanto’s roots: http://Etymological Dictionary

Not very complete indeed, and not always very correct as well, but better than nothing.
Thanks a lot.

Re the Spanish vs. English speed of speaking thingamabob, they actually cover the same amount of text at the same speed reading aloud, it's just that Spanish has much more equally distributed stress over their words and pronounce everything in the word, thus sounding fast.

English speakers actually just have trouble latching onto the fairly rhythmic sounding Spanish because we can't find any over stressed sounds in there. In English, we pronounce whole words like enough as if they are spelt 'nuf. This makes the language seem fast for Spanish speakers, because all of a sudden we've contracted a massive word into one syllable. Conversely, the English speakers can't find similar drawn out sounds in Spanish, so they assume all the drawn out sounds are infact being contracted into machine-gun-speak.

The differences can probably be blamed on the origins of Spanish and English - Spanish was part of the Latin language (Latin was believed to have been stress free) originally, and had influences from Arabic etc, which put the stress on the end of the word. English, however, came from the Germanic language (probably Ingvaeonic dialect with some nordic influences), which tended to stress the first syllable or the biggest "sound" in the word. Furthermore, English was part of a sprachbund (is that the right word?) with Old Irish and various brythonic languages. Those languages developed quite closely together, with words gaining a really unique sound to them, and the stress patterns becoming very similar (nowadays, English and Irish sound as if they could be dialects of the same language to the unacquainted, because they have similar dipthongs, long and short vowels, palatalisation (both have "tj"/"cx" speakers) and sentence stress).

But you'll probably notice that English music and media is having an influence on the pronunciation of languages world wide, similar to how French did the same for a large part of the western world at one point. Spanish has a healthy amount of speakers, so I guess it's also somewhat immune to that too

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.

This thread was heavily derailed

To answer the OP's question, I am of the latter. I studied French for 5 years and got straight As but would never describe myself as being able to speak French. When someone speaks French I can pick up some nouns and verbs but my comprehension is horrible. I blame a lot of this on the way it was taught but much of it on myself for not really being into the language. I was at first but it ended up being so boring that I just stopped trying. Perhaps after I've mastered Eo I will go back and pick up where I left off, as my knowledge of Eo should help in learning other languages.

Other than French I've studied Japanese. I can count well in Japanese and know how to name just about every body part. But the bulk of this comes from Karate, outside of stuff relating to karate the only thing I remember about Japanese is "kore-wa" and "sore-wa" which I believe were "here is" and "there is" and I think "i am" would be "are-wa." But beyond watching some videos and listening to a few audiobooks I didn't study it much outside of Karate (and what they teach is limited).

I started learning Eo about 4 or 5 months ago and I already have a higher comprehension of it than I ever did with French. From here it's mainly memorizing nouns/verb roots and improving the speed at which I can link the sound to what they represent. Right now I still struggle with certain words and I end up getting "caught" on that word and not processing what was said after it, even though I may have understood it otherwise.

Until I discovered Eo I was convinced that I was not able to pick up another language. Now I am happy to say that is not the case. I still have much to learn but I am learning at a constant pace and am enjoying every step along the way.