Open thread, Jan. 09 - Jan. 15, 2017

MrMind

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

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1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

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I agree with all this (except that I happen not to be an Esperanto speaker myself) except for this:

Why not use a language you could learn 10x faster?

I am sure Esperanto is easier to learn than English. I do not believe it is 10x easier in any useful sense. Were you exaggerating for effect, or was that a serious claim, and in the latter case could you point me at some evidence?

This is a wild estimate based on my personal experience. May be a different number for other people, of course, either depending on their personal characteristics, or how much their native language is already similar to English or Esperanto.

My Esperanto exposure:

reading two textbooks
spending a week in an Esperanto-speaking environment, maybe 10 times
spending an afternoon in an Esperanto-speaking environment, maybe 50 times

My English exposure:

5 years at elementary school, 4 years at high school, 4 years at university
reading dozens of English

... (read more)

0Dagon9y

Native English speaker here. I studied Spanish for a few years in High School, and Japanese for a year, and Esperanto for about 6 months of weekly extracurricular sessions. I managed to learn spoken and written Esperanto about as well as I learned spoken Japanese, in roughly 1/10 the hours spent. That's not strong evidence that learning it to fluency and communication comfort is 1/10 as hard, but learning the basics and a few thousand words is really quite easy for someone who already knows a romance or germanic language. I'd very much believe 1/2 to 1/3 of the effort required to fluency in a second natural language. That said, I don't think "ease of learning" is enough. There is no path to a designed language becoming universal. Network effects of language fluency are HUGE - the value to knowing a language is so dependent on who already knows it that there is simply no believable adoption rate for any minor language to become dominant. My hope is that AR + machine translation get good enough in the next era that it doesn't matter too much. And since the future isn't evenly distributed, the "base" language is likely to be one that's very popular today, I'd bet on English, Mandarin (with simplified alphabet-based writing), or Hindi in that order.