Cxu Esperanto estas vera idealisma? Komunikado tra lingvoj estas praktika afero, do eble lernanti Esperanto estas granda praktika afero.
(Is Esperanto truely idealistic? Communication across language barriers is a practical matter, so many learning Esperanto is a trememdously practical matter too.)
Mi lernis la fundamentojn antaux multaj jaroj, kaj gxi ek-utilas je suprizaj okazioj.
(I learned the basics years ago, and it comes in useful at surprising times.)
Interesting! As an atheist who speaks Esperanto (and spoke it much better when I was younger), I guess I'm two-thirds of the way toward being idealistic. I'm not a full-fledged libertarian, although I lean that way on many issues.
I speak English only because I've studied it for over 14 years (well, I can write it somewhat decently, at least).
Esperanto, however, I just started learning it last year kaj nun mi kredas, ke mi pli bone parolas, skribas kaj komprenas Esperanton ol la anglan.
Yes, with English you're supposed to have the world at your feet and maybe that's true in some way… if you've got the time and the money to pay teachers and institutes so that your English becomes understandable to everybody.
Esperanto estas belegan lingvon, sed estas freneze pensi ke gxi povas esti internacia lingvo. Gxi estas tro euxropa por esti vere internacia, kaj nuntempe gxi ne povas konkuri kun la angla. Tamen ne povas esti malbone lerni novan lingvon, kaj la Esperanto estas la plej belan lingvon ke mi jam vidis.
@verevie Actually I can prove it, with math even (the only true, demonstrable way to prove something): there are no more than 20,000 root words in Esperanto. There are no less than 170,000 root words in English. Now, pretending all words combinations are valid and both languages have the same flexibility (English is actually better at both but I'll let that slide =P), there are (using the apt formula {(n² + n) / 2} ) 200 million Esperanto sentences and 14.5 billion English sentences.
CONTINUED: granted, greater than 99% of random word combinations are going to be gibberish, you can see a comparison of how they stack up.
Esperanto is designed to be a simple (at least for those who already speak a Latin based language), quick to learn language that serves as a medium for basic translation between foreigners, and thus is quiet short, which limits the level of expression (without, as Esperanto users do, lending words from other (*cough* proper) languages).
Oh and I failed at being clear: that would be 2 word sentences, and since I didn't think of their arrangement could be potentially either way, it would need to be just n²+n. I'd write the algorithm for a range of lengths of a sentence, but I think I've made this convoluted enough already...
@Truthiness231 But see, Esperantists don't speak using solely word roots. The word for "hospital" is "malsanejo", but the word for health is "sano". Malsanejo isn't a root word, but it is a word. Another word for hospital could be "sanigejo" or "doktorejo".
Also, if you're saying that the lack of possible word combinations makes the language stale, then you *have* to use grammatical combinations that are grammatical.
@PatrickNiedzielski While, granted, I can't prove an opinion (because they're subjective), I can prove a fact: google "Esperantido" and see why it exists (I'm short on time at the moment but you should get the idea ^>^).
Not that I think Esperanto wasn't a brilliant idea and it did well for it's purpose, but it still isn't the ultimate language for it's position (which is one meant to be rather rigid and short, so it's fast, easy, and uniform across the planet, not a language for literary arts)
@Truthiness231 The goals of a successful international auxiliary language are mutually contradictory. Toki Pona, for instance, is extremely rigid and short, fast, easy, and uniform across the planet, but it does not make for a successful auxlang, due to its inability to easily convey complex ideas. But, this was sacrificed to keep the ease of learning the language. Esperantidoj are simply other auxlangs.
Furthermore, Raŭmismo disagrees with your characterization of Esperanto's position.
@Truthiness231 For clarification, I say the goals are contradictory because: take for instance, a Latin-based (romlang) auxlang vs. an a priori (words made up) auxlang. The former is not universally easy to learn -- it's easy for some to learn, and hard for others to learn. Auxlangs are designed to be easy to learn for everyone. So the latter option, which is equally *hard* for everyone to learn, is in fact equally easy for everyone to learn. Not optimal.
Some European languages are indeed descended from Latin, ie the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Romanian, Italian, etc).
But many are not.
These include the Germanic languages (English, German Dutch, Swedish), the Slavic (Serbian, Polish & Russian), the Uralic languages (Finnish & Hungarian), then there is the lonely Basque language, a language isolate, unrelated to any known language.
lojban is a better language IMO... though esperanto would be a good unifying western language, it definitely won't unify western and eastern languages.
I hope the west either unifies under english, or esperanto, and the east unifies under another language. Then the last 2 hurdles will be, unifying the human race in language, and then bridging the gap between our logic deprived language, and computers which are the exact opposite in that sense :)
Hi Penn fans. Penn Says videos have been discontinued, so you won't be seeing any new content on here. You can check out our Profile on our Channel Page for more info. We'll still be checking in, so hope to keep chatting with you all! Thanks!
There's one DISadvantage of learning Esperanto. You're going to come into contact with people from many different countries. They will correspond with you and show you photos of their little Esperanto club in Timbuktu or Mindanao with a grubby cardboard sign drawn with native hand-made crayons in excellent Esperanto to tell you it's the Esperanto club of Timbuktu or Mindanao.
...Then since you're a rich Westerner, they'll try to hit you up for free gifts... :-)
It is an interesting language for sure. try IRC sometime and go to ##esperanto on freenode (google irc, and freenode and esperanto too if you all don't know what those things are)
You should Google "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto." It thoroughly tears apart the supposed "regularity" and "neutrality" of that poorly-designed, sexist, 19th-century language.
For instance, while Esperanto has more than 15000 root words, Lojban has about 1200 (mostly based on the findings of comparative linguistics e.g. Swadesh list), from which you are to derive the rest of the word inventory. So you don't just copy a word like "federacio" for "federation" as in Esperanto; you are to come up with a derivative/combined form from the more basic level of concepts.
Also, the grammar is based on the principle of predicate logic, which is responsible for the unprecedented unambiguity & versatility & creativity of Lojban as a human language. You are still free to say ambiguous or emotional (there's a dedicated word class for this) things in Lojban. The point is that with Lojban you can have more control of your verbal expressions than with other languages so long as you are aware of what you want to say.
Lojban (unlike Esperanto) has a topic marker like Japanese & Chinese do. Its bare root words (unlike Esperanto's) can be put next to each other and form one predicate like Kanji and Chinese characters can. Marking tense in Lojban (unlike in Esperanto) is not obligatory, like Chinese isn't. Also, Lojban words are closer to Chinese/Japanese than Esperanto words are, an example being:
The tonality is used in Chinese & Japanese so that the speaker can distinguish homonyms. There is no homonym in Lojban, so there is no need to use tonality. But you can use it if you want, without affecting the meaning of the word.
Cha alone can mean so many things in Chinese, not in Lojban. What Chinese distinguishes by the tone of sound, Lojban does by the combination of sound:
Sorry, but Japanese and Chinese are not the same or even close! Chinese is a tonal language, Japanese is not. Japanese is an inflected language (words change form) where Chinese is non-inflected (word forms are invariable). Japanese uses multiple syllable words, Chinese words are all single-syllable. Chinese is in the Sino-Tibetan language family, Japanese is in its own family. While Japanese borrows Chinese words, it also borrows English words, but is related to neither tongue.
"Sorry, but Japanese and Chinese are not the same or even close!"
I never said they are the same.
"Chinese is a tonal language, Japanese is not."
Japanese is not classified as a tonal language, yes, but it does have phonemic tones. hashi (chopsticks) and hashi (bridge) are distinguished by such tones.
Yet they are both spelled はし. I know that Japanese has pitch accent (as opposed to the stress accent of many languages) but that makes it no different from Swedish, for example, or classical Greek. English also distinguishes a few words by accent, such as to and TOO, or ABsent (adjective) and abSENT (verb). How exactly does one distinguish between 橋 and 箸?
Thank you. Now I can see one reason why kanji is still used in Japanese: it helps distinguish words which might otherwise be spelled the same if they were only written in kana. I just wish the online dictionaries I consult would show the accent!
Tea in Chinese is pronounced more like t'sa. "chah-tee" is redundant, it has the ending "tee" to remind the Southern Californians for whom Lojban is so popular that the word stands for "tea". It's like the Chinese system of one half of an ideograph is the meaning, the other one clues you into the sounds, only in Lojban the sound-clue HAPPENS to be in English. Haha, honestly dude, you might have come up with a better example of faithfulness to native forms.
The Lojban "tcati" is an algorithmically fused form of simplified sounds derived from Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic words: "ca", "ti", "cai", "te", "cai", "cai", respectively. Each phoneme in the resulting Lojban root word serves as a sound-clue.
Such a class exists in a less formalised/systematic fashion in many kinds of language including English and Esperanto, commonly called "interjection".
Although I don't have statistics, I'm quite certain they are less than Esperanto speakers in number. But interestingly there're always more people on Lojban's IRC (50-80) than Esperanto's (20-40), which is hugely disproportionate with respect to the alleged 2 million speakers of the latter.
ah, I'm somewhat interested in learning Esperanto. I already know some Spanish, German, and Russian. I know Esperanto is a conlang and designed to be learned easily, but how long did it take you to learn ?
La lernado na Esperanto bezonas plimalpli unu al tri monatoj.
To learn Esperanto it takes about one to three months. A bit more practice is needed for complete fluency, in terms of recognizing words others say, but a passive/reading/writing mastery is possible to at least some degree in this timespan.
I know that i am not the first that says that, but I studied Esperanto for 20 days and i started to send e-mails in Esperanto.
I studied English for 9 years, use it everyday because i work abroad, and i have problem to understand if this guy of the video is saying bad or good things about Esperanto... (Starting from his pronunciation of: Esp-rantow).
If only people understood this, everyone wouldn't be so hot on English, which is horrible in the role of 'world language.' English is so illogical and inconsistent and orthographically nightmarish that it's beyond being a joke.
I personally know a 60 year old woman who lives in a very rural area (Houlton, Maine) who has learned Esperanto in less than three years almost fluently, so if you were to start at the age of 55, it'd be no problem.
Also, I highly recommend Incubus. It's out on DVD now, and it's a trip.
I didn't like it. Novelty of Shatner wore off, he pronounced Esperanto badly thinking the words in print should be pronounced like French, and the whole arty horror story can't mask the low-budget effects.
For people who think they can't draw, the key book that's been in print for 3 decades is DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN by Betty Edwards. Very wordy, but it talks about how drawing is not in the hands but in your brain and how you must change your attitude to favour the "right hemisphere".
Esperanto really works, it has a very regular grammar, but it is still a language, you need to learn thousands of words, but 10x simpler than learning a European language.
...and there must be more than 20,000 Esperanto-speakers in the world. But the count depends on how you set the bar for language proficiency. Several million have bought instructional books and tapes and videos, so you can say there are several million BEGINNERS. Raise the bar and you could get a million good speakers. They form a network, thinly spread, that's good enough for very interesting hostelling if you go travelling, especially in Eastern Europe.
The problem with that is not the English-speaker learning something new, but UNlearning the foul, slurred vowels of English. A European might ask what the fuss is about the vowels. They are defined as the five cardinal or "open" vowels, which don't change during pronunciation. The sample phrase in English is "Ma, may we go too?" Practice associating those sounds with a e i o u respectively. The sounds never change regardless of what's before or after the vowels.
mi kunsentas ke la internacia lingvo taŭgas kiel projekto por mezaĝulo. sed ĝi eĉ pli bone taŭgas por junuloj.... mi mem bedaŭras ke mi ne trovis Esperanton dum mi vere junis...
it shouldn't be; it should be (IPA)- esperanto. one mustn't bring their own accent into another language. you wouldn't speak french with an american accent.
well, english and french are both natural languages and are very different in phonology. however, esperanto was designed to be easy to speak and i don't think it's too much of a stretch just to say "a" instead of "o" (or whatever you think that sound to be).
@Lakmeer Mi konsentas ke lojban estas pli interesa kaj malfacila ol Esperanto, sed gxi ne estas bona kialo de ne lerni Esperanto. Lojban estas preskaux mallernebla. Por lerni Lojban oni devas dedicxi multaj da horoj kaj peno, sed oni povas lerni Esperanto tre rapide kaj sen multe da peno. Se oni havas la bezonata energio, lerni lojban estas unu el la plej bonaj sxatokupoj, sed se ne, lerni Esperanto estas tre bona ankaux.
@Lakmeer Mi konsentas ke lojban estas pli interesa kaj malfacila ol Esperanto, sed gxi ne estas bona kialo de ne lerni Esperanto. Lojban estas preskaux mallernebla. Por lerni Lojban oni devas dedicxi multaj da horoj kaj peno, sed oni povas lerni Esperanto tre rapide kaj sen multe da peno. Se oni havas la bezonata energio, lerni lojban estas unu el la plej bonaj sxatokupoj, sed se ne, lerni Esperanto estas tre bona ankaux.
I suggest that you become a bee-keeper. If you read a book on bee-keeping, as with any intelligent, inquisitive person, you'll be hooked. The honeybee's mastery of its model of survival will amaze you. You can do it anywhere- from the desert, to the balcony of a 35th floor New York condo- they will find nectar and honey and they will persist.
I wondered why, when the Sherlock Homes retired, he became a bee keeper. When I got my first hives, I understood. It is a thinking person's pursuit.
Mi parolas Esperanton.Mi lernis ghin en Shtata Universitato en Kanariaj Insuloj.Pere de la internacia lingvo mi havis multajn avantaghojn: amuzighis,gajnis sufiche da mono,konis aliajn landojn kaj kulturojn, trovis multajn geamikojn k.t.p. Do mi konsilas al vi lerni la lingvon por esti pli felicha.Saluton de Tony Sar!
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Learn to speak the truth in English for a start, you fat fuck dancing monkey propagandist for fascists. Remember Julius Streicher never expected to be hung at Nuremberg.
Cómo y donde aprendiste español? Yo también lo hablo (porque vivo en México) y también hablo Esperanto! Esperanto es el mejor idioma del muuuundo, pero español siempre será mi primer amor ñ_ñ
Do you think being an Esperantist necessarily means you're an athiest? A person who believes in some omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent intelligence does not necessarily subscribe to religion. Even if they do, does this mean they cannot or should not learn Esperanto?
Anyone can learn Esperanto, it is the heritage of all human beings, regardless of your beliefs.
Do it! within a college semester's time you will have mastered Esperanto and then you can go on to another discipline: wine-making, fencing or another language.
I spent my spare time in Junior High learning the Elvish Language, you know, the one featured in JRR Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings". I used some resources from the web, and also a small red book with white print on the front from Barnes and Noble. Using the books and films, it was really fun to be able to write things using the elvish alphabet and understand what was said in the beautiful Elvish language.
The use of Esperanto was counseled by UNESCO for two conventions, by personalyties as Einstein, Umberto Eco, Ghandi and others, a lot of Nobel prizes are/was esperantists, Esperanto itself was proposed to Nobel Prize in last year, and it is teached in more than 25 universities only here in Europe, and used by millions of people all over the world. It is not a stupid waste of time, it is the only solution to world comunication that really works.
esperanto can be used to translate web pages - just build your site in esperanto and it can be easily translated to any language automatically.
And funny fact - Ludwik Zamenhof who invented esperanto had to do it again because his father burned notebook with it (well, he just reconstructed language from his memory).
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You represent my views in public, quite well. At least 60% overlap on the important stuff, which is really great. Esperanto is BS. Learn Papau Cannibal-speak before learning Esperanto. Or get a cybernetic implant and learn machine pulses, like Kevin Warwick, since that's REALLY cutting edge... LOL
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If you want to learn a useless language with cool uses, learn latin and then get a bunch of Petersen field guides. Seriously, then you can get clues from the trees to remember their names. It's fun. I can teach you how to draw. Scientific Illustration method can teach anyone how to draw using logic, grids, and the sci-ill continuous tone technique (circular technique). Of course, you won't learn how to do sketchy bullshit, but how to literally represent reality, which can then be abstracted.
Bla-bla-bla, internet, impossible, idealistic, bla-bla-bla, environmentalists, bla-bla, idealistics, bla-bla, open-source, stupid idealistics, bla-bla, you can't stop the trends, and the trend is the real learnable, neutral, international linguage. Ghis la venonta UK kara.
You should go for cooking, man. It's arty and practical, plus the ladies love a man who can cook. Yeah, I know you're married and all but it's never too late to impress her.
yeah right, i remember a joke where this guy said he doesn't trust Chinese script because he doesn't know what it means and doesn't trust anyone to tell them. He imagines getting them and walk among some Chinese who see it and giggle going "Ha! You Salt and Peppa?!" Best to learn the language to make sure you know what it means.
what do "man of the world" got to do with anything? He wants to learn something, not get his kids names in a language he doesn't speak. That's just dumb anyway. And Penn doesn't even look like the tattoo person type. I just mentioned the danger of it, that's all and here you say it's trivial even though YOU suggested it.
You should learn Lojban, esperanto has many flaws and the grammar of Lojban is based on boolean algebra. No ambiguity though so I'm not sure that you would be a big fan. It's mostly a nerds' language.
Learning Esperanto, will be much easier, now that there are LOADS of resources online. Heck, I learned within a couple weeks through a free online course.
Learn Dungeons and Dragons. Go. Explore vast, uncharted lands with your imagination as the horizon. Or, at least, visit a reality that doesn't suck as much as this one.
Know the universal method to win at Dungeons & Dragons? Cast a Chain Lightning spell, then cast Speak With Dead so they can't lie, and then Resurrect those you shouldn't have killed in the first place!
Other D&D joke: the two worst names for your D&D character: 1) Sailbad the Sinner, and 2) Elvish Parsley.
In a way, learning a new language will be a lot like learning your upright bass. If you don't practice regularly you can forget very quickly. I wouldn't bother to learn a new language unless I planned to spend time in an area where its the common language.
Hunting, there's always room for another blood brother at tribe Nuge!
I'm sure uncle Ted would be happy to teach you everything you need to know and you could take your bass with you so when you're not hunting you and uncle Ted could come up with some jazz motor city rock fusion!
I speak Esperanto pretty fluently and I stopped speaking it because it's fucking dumb. It's the socialism of languages - the whole thing is a command-and-control approach to something that already has an emergent (market-oriented) solution. People on the whole think it is more worthwhile to learn languages already in common use (English, Spanish, German) than something that Zamenhof thought would be "easier". The market has spoken.
But that's not an argument against Esperanto- it's an argument against the usefulness of Esperanto as an international auxiliary language. There are many other perfectly good reasons to learn it (interest in planned languages, access to literature, aesthetic appeal, Pasporta Servo, etc.)
You don't have to believe in Zamenhof's ideology in order to appreciate his language. :)
Yeah, I agree with that, but one of the problems there is that most of the people you will be able to speak to will be talking about how great Esperanto is. I am not sure that I regret learning Esperanto, it's an interesting thing to bring up at parties (and I certainly didn't do it to usher in a new age or anything), but I stopped using it long ago because none of the conversations were interesting. Plus, it's not much harder to learn Spanish or German than it is to learn Esperanto.
"most of the people you will be able to speak to will be talking about how great Esperanto is."
I'm with ya on that one. I still enjoy Esperanto as a minor hobby/skill/curiosity, but I'm no longer active in the community because many aspects of it were too obsessive and cultish for my tastes.
"it's not much harder to learn Spanish or German than it is to learn Esperanto."
Exactly! To me, there's no such thing as a "hard" or "easy" language; just similar or different to what you already know.
As one who's studied Spanish and German (and other national languages), I can say with certainty that you're wrong when you say: "Plus, it's not much harder to learn Spanish or German than it is to learn Esperanto." (Unless you are unusually talented at learning languages.) Esperanto is the first and only foreign language I've become fluent in besides English.
Cxu Esperanto estas vera idealisma? Komunikado tra lingvoj estas praktika afero, do eble lernanti Esperanto estas granda praktika afero.
(Is Esperanto truely idealistic? Communication across language barriers is a practical matter, so many learning Esperanto is a trememdously practical matter too.)
Mi lernis la fundamentojn antaux multaj jaroj, kaj gxi ek-utilas je suprizaj okazioj.
(I learned the basics years ago, and it comes in useful at surprising times.)
KapStuf 1 month ago
Esperanto is a beautiful and simple language that I recommend to everyone.
Esperanto estas tre bela kaj simpla lingvo kion mi rekomendas al ĉiuj.
WilhelmDrake 1 month ago
Interesting! As an atheist who speaks Esperanto (and spoke it much better when I was younger), I guess I'm two-thirds of the way toward being idealistic. I'm not a full-fledged libertarian, although I lean that way on many issues.
gerryschulze 7 months ago
Mi vere amas tio cxi. Estas video pri Esperanto, tiam Esperanta interparolado estigxas, montranta ke Esperanto vere estas. xD :)
verevie 8 months ago
I speak English only because I've studied it for over 14 years (well, I can write it somewhat decently, at least).
Esperanto, however, I just started learning it last year kaj nun mi kredas, ke mi pli bone parolas, skribas kaj komprenas Esperanton ol la anglan.
Yes, with English you're supposed to have the world at your feet and maybe that's true in some way… if you've got the time and the money to pay teachers and institutes so that your English becomes understandable to everybody.
whynottryitall 9 months ago
Esperanto estas belegan lingvon, sed estas freneze pensi ke gxi povas esti internacia lingvo. Gxi estas tro euxropa por esti vere internacia, kaj nuntempe gxi ne povas konkuri kun la angla. Tamen ne povas esti malbone lerni novan lingvon, kaj la Esperanto estas la plej belan lingvon ke mi jam vidis.
ilaustril 10 months ago
You can learn Esperanto in a day. You will soon get board with it.
Hypatia1951 1 year ago
@Hypatia1951 Exactly; the language is so small that it quickly becomes stale...
Truthiness231 1 year ago
@Truthiness231 How is it small? Are you sure it just didn't feel that way because the amount you knew was small?
verevie 8 months ago
@verevie Actually I can prove it, with math even (the only true, demonstrable way to prove something): there are no more than 20,000 root words in Esperanto. There are no less than 170,000 root words in English. Now, pretending all words combinations are valid and both languages have the same flexibility (English is actually better at both but I'll let that slide =P), there are (using the apt formula {(n² + n) / 2} ) 200 million Esperanto sentences and 14.5 billion English sentences.
Truthiness231 8 months ago
CONTINUED: granted, greater than 99% of random word combinations are going to be gibberish, you can see a comparison of how they stack up.
Esperanto is designed to be a simple (at least for those who already speak a Latin based language), quick to learn language that serves as a medium for basic translation between foreigners, and thus is quiet short, which limits the level of expression (without, as Esperanto users do, lending words from other (*cough* proper) languages).
Truthiness231 8 months ago
EDIT:
Oh and I failed at being clear: that would be 2 word sentences, and since I didn't think of their arrangement could be potentially either way, it would need to be just n²+n. I'd write the algorithm for a range of lengths of a sentence, but I think I've made this convoluted enough already...
Truthiness231 8 months ago
@Truthiness231 But see, Esperantists don't speak using solely word roots. The word for "hospital" is "malsanejo", but the word for health is "sano". Malsanejo isn't a root word, but it is a word. Another word for hospital could be "sanigejo" or "doktorejo".
Also, if you're saying that the lack of possible word combinations makes the language stale, then you *have* to use grammatical combinations that are grammatical.
Besides, you can't "prove" an opinion.
PatrickNiedzielski 5 months ago
@PatrickNiedzielski While, granted, I can't prove an opinion (because they're subjective), I can prove a fact: google "Esperantido" and see why it exists (I'm short on time at the moment but you should get the idea ^>^).
Not that I think Esperanto wasn't a brilliant idea and it did well for it's purpose, but it still isn't the ultimate language for it's position (which is one meant to be rather rigid and short, so it's fast, easy, and uniform across the planet, not a language for literary arts)
Truthiness231 5 months ago
@Truthiness231 The goals of a successful international auxiliary language are mutually contradictory. Toki Pona, for instance, is extremely rigid and short, fast, easy, and uniform across the planet, but it does not make for a successful auxlang, due to its inability to easily convey complex ideas. But, this was sacrificed to keep the ease of learning the language. Esperantidoj are simply other auxlangs.
Furthermore, Raŭmismo disagrees with your characterization of Esperanto's position.
PatrickNiedzielski 5 months ago
@Truthiness231 For clarification, I say the goals are contradictory because: take for instance, a Latin-based (romlang) auxlang vs. an a priori (words made up) auxlang. The former is not universally easy to learn -- it's easy for some to learn, and hard for others to learn. Auxlangs are designed to be easy to learn for everyone. So the latter option, which is equally *hard* for everyone to learn, is in fact equally easy for everyone to learn. Not optimal.
PatrickNiedzielski 5 months ago
@Truthiness231
There are not alot of roots in Esperanto because it is somewhat agglutinative and creates new words through compounding.
Anything you can say in English you can say in Esperanto.
WilhelmDrake 1 month ago
@Hypatia1951 I didn't get bored of it.
verevie 8 months ago
Sure reminds me of Spanish... I know its not... but it really does...
rainstainn 1 year ago
@rainstainn French looks like Spanish to me too. It's because the European languages are more or less different dialects of Latin.
verevie 8 months ago
@verevie
Some European languages are indeed descended from Latin, ie the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Romanian, Italian, etc).
But many are not.
These include the Germanic languages (English, German Dutch, Swedish), the Slavic (Serbian, Polish & Russian), the Uralic languages (Finnish & Hungarian), then there is the lonely Basque language, a language isolate, unrelated to any known language.
WilhelmDrake 1 month ago
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I'm a Christian Linux user who is learning Esperanto =)
FortWhenTeaThyme 1 year ago
Haha, I'm a Christian, linux user who is learning Esperantp.
FortWhenTeaThyme 1 year ago
Ĉu vi komprenas iom da esperanton? Kia bela lingvo, kiu liberigas vian menson.
lumaix 1 year ago
@lumaix Ĝi vere liberigas onian menson. :)
verevie 1 year ago
xD I am a libertarian atheist kaj mi parolas Esperanton.
verevie 1 year ago 9
@verevie Ha. Mi ankaux. Sed, mi estas komencanto de Esperanto.
fitmyths 8 months ago
lojban is a better language IMO... though esperanto would be a good unifying western language, it definitely won't unify western and eastern languages.
I hope the west either unifies under english, or esperanto, and the east unifies under another language. Then the last 2 hurdles will be, unifying the human race in language, and then bridging the gap between our logic deprived language, and computers which are the exact opposite in that sense :)
TheReasonWhyGuy 1 year ago
How about all the Atheist, Progressive Esperantists? :D
bacofishtaco 1 year ago
You do drawl.
mrmikerotch 1 year ago
@mrmikerotch He does? He's from Massachusetts.
pennsays 1 year ago
Hi Penn fans. Penn Says videos have been discontinued, so you won't be seeing any new content on here. You can check out our Profile on our Channel Page for more info. We'll still be checking in, so hope to keep chatting with you all! Thanks!
pennsays 1 year ago
I am a Christian Linux using esperantist
travisman1994 1 year ago
Saluton! Penn, what about: Atheist, Libertarian, Linux using Esperantists? haha :)
PerditaLupo 1 year ago 2
@PerditaLupo Sounds like a goal! LOL. I've got a few of those (working on Esperanto), i'm not atheist though.
ProphetAnonymous 1 year ago
Linux is evil, though. Eeeee-vullllllll!
JoeDeceiver 1 year ago
@JoeDeceiver It's communist, obviously! :P
verevie 8 months ago
¿Ĉu vi scipovas kompreni min? Mi skribas Esperante esperante, ke vi povu kompreni min.
Walabio 2 years ago
Esperanto is a constructed language with germanic, and romance words, It's really cool the it sounds.
AlreadyEddie 2 years ago
woot for libertarian atheists!!
rightwinglefty1 2 years ago 4
There's one DISadvantage of learning Esperanto. You're going to come into contact with people from many different countries. They will correspond with you and show you photos of their little Esperanto club in Timbuktu or Mindanao with a grubby cardboard sign drawn with native hand-made crayons in excellent Esperanto to tell you it's the Esperanto club of Timbuktu or Mindanao.
...Then since you're a rich Westerner, they'll try to hit you up for free gifts... :-)
Dracopol 2 years ago
bona Penn, kio vi provas diri auh esprimi?
Mi ne komprenas ... hehe, shajne kiel marshadis.
Sed, estas bona kvankam, Mi faras same afero. ---
La antauha mesagho estis de komencanto :)
ltfallin 2 years ago
It is an interesting language for sure. try IRC sometime and go to ##esperanto on freenode (google irc, and freenode and esperanto too if you all don't know what those things are)
ltfallin 2 years ago
You should Google "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto." It thoroughly tears apart the supposed "regularity" and "neutrality" of that poorly-designed, sexist, 19th-century language.
vezrig 2 years ago
how is it sexist?
chica476 2 years ago
Every noun for people is inherently male, and all female terms are derived from them with the suffix -ino. Example: patro, father, patrino, mother.
vezrig 2 years ago
hey vezrig,
that's stupid.
lol
that's like calling spanish sexist because things are masculine if women AND men are involved.
It makes things easier
it would be the same if they were inherently feminine.
its not sexist xD
it just chooses one gender for a generality.
the language has some linguistic problems with it, but nothing which keeps the language from being spoken. it's not some sort of master language.
darris321 2 years ago
Lojban is by far more neutral & creative a language. I speak both Esperanto and Lojban, and I find the latter more intellectually stimulating.
mirandansa 2 years ago 2
What makes it more intellectually stimulating?
gaBehcuoDsuoitneterP 2 years ago
For instance, while Esperanto has more than 15000 root words, Lojban has about 1200 (mostly based on the findings of comparative linguistics e.g. Swadesh list), from which you are to derive the rest of the word inventory. So you don't just copy a word like "federacio" for "federation" as in Esperanto; you are to come up with a derivative/combined form from the more basic level of concepts.
mirandansa 2 years ago
Also, the grammar is based on the principle of predicate logic, which is responsible for the unprecedented unambiguity & versatility & creativity of Lojban as a human language. You are still free to say ambiguous or emotional (there's a dedicated word class for this) things in Lojban. The point is that with Lojban you can have more control of your verbal expressions than with other languages so long as you are aware of what you want to say.
mirandansa 2 years ago
Will it teach you 日本語 or 中文？
coolsteven2 2 years ago
@coolsteven
Lojban (unlike Esperanto) has a topic marker like Japanese & Chinese do. Its bare root words (unlike Esperanto's) can be put next to each other and form one predicate like Kanji and Chinese characters can. Marking tense in Lojban (unlike in Esperanto) is not obligatory, like Chinese isn't. Also, Lojban words are closer to Chinese/Japanese than Esperanto words are, an example being:
teo (Esperanto)
tcati (Lojban, pronounced as "chah-tee")
茶 (Chinese/Japanese, pronounced as "chah")
mirandansa 2 years ago
Chinese is tonal and some middle eastern languages what about that? because to me Cha alone can mean SO many things.
coolsteven2 2 years ago
The tonality is used in Chinese & Japanese so that the speaker can distinguish homonyms. There is no homonym in Lojban, so there is no need to use tonality. But you can use it if you want, without affecting the meaning of the word.
Cha alone can mean so many things in Chinese, not in Lojban. What Chinese distinguishes by the tone of sound, Lojban does by the combination of sound:
妈 [mā] - mamta
骂 [mà] - dapma
马 [mǎ] - xirma
麻 [má] - marna
mirandansa 2 years ago
Sorry, but Japanese and Chinese are not the same or even close! Chinese is a tonal language, Japanese is not. Japanese is an inflected language (words change form) where Chinese is non-inflected (word forms are invariable). Japanese uses multiple syllable words, Chinese words are all single-syllable. Chinese is in the Sino-Tibetan language family, Japanese is in its own family. While Japanese borrows Chinese words, it also borrows English words, but is related to neither tongue.
ccoraxfan 2 years ago
"Sorry, but Japanese and Chinese are not the same or even close!"
I never said they are the same.
"Chinese is a tonal language, Japanese is not."
Japanese is not classified as a tonal language, yes, but it does have phonemic tones. hashi (chopsticks) and hashi (bridge) are distinguished by such tones.
mirandansa 2 years ago
Yet they are both spelled はし. I know that Japanese has pitch accent (as opposed to the stress accent of many languages) but that makes it no different from Swedish, for example, or classical Greek. English also distinguishes a few words by accent, such as to and TOO, or ABsent (adjective) and abSENT (verb). How exactly does one distinguish between 橋 and 箸?
ccoraxfan 2 years ago
Yes, Swedish and classical Greek have some kind of restricted tone system too.
As for はし, haSHI (橋) and HAshi (箸). There's also hashi (端, edge), where pitch doesn't change.
mirandansa 2 years ago
Thank you. Now I can see one reason why kanji is still used in Japanese: it helps distinguish words which might otherwise be spelled the same if they were only written in kana. I just wish the online dictionaries I consult would show the accent!
ccoraxfan 2 years ago
Tea in Chinese is pronounced more like t'sa. "chah-tee" is redundant, it has the ending "tee" to remind the Southern Californians for whom Lojban is so popular that the word stands for "tea". It's like the Chinese system of one half of an ideograph is the meaning, the other one clues you into the sounds, only in Lojban the sound-clue HAPPENS to be in English. Haha, honestly dude, you might have come up with a better example of faithfulness to native forms.
Dracopol 2 years ago
The Lojban "tcati" is an algorithmically fused form of simplified sounds derived from Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic words: "ca", "ti", "cai", "te", "cai", "cai", respectively. Each phoneme in the resulting Lojban root word serves as a sound-clue.
mirandansa 2 years ago
@Dracopol Southern Californians are used to redundancy: 'The City of Culver City'.
pennsays 2 years ago
Hahaha, a word-class dedicated to ambiguous or emotional things? That sounds like PLANNING for spontaneity in sex!
Dracopol 2 years ago
Such a class exists in a less formalised/systematic fashion in many kinds of language including English and Esperanto, commonly called "interjection".
mirandansa 2 years ago
Why is it more intellectually stimulating?
CortlanT 2 years ago
I explained that in two comments below.
mirandansa 2 years ago
Yes, I saw that right after I commented, sorry.
CortlanT 2 years ago
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nice! thanks for sharing
lordkelvin1 2 years ago
how many people speak Lojban ?
Kurdlov 2 years ago
Although I don't have statistics, I'm quite certain they are less than Esperanto speakers in number. But interestingly there're always more people on Lojban's IRC (50-80) than Esperanto's (20-40), which is hugely disproportionate with respect to the alleged 2 million speakers of the latter.
mirandansa 2 years ago
ah, I'm somewhat interested in learning Esperanto. I already know some Spanish, German, and Russian. I know Esperanto is a conlang and designed to be learned easily, but how long did it take you to learn ?
Kurdlov 2 years ago
La lernado na Esperanto bezonas plimalpli unu al tri monatoj.
To learn Esperanto it takes about one to three months. A bit more practice is needed for complete fluency, in terms of recognizing words others say, but a passive/reading/writing mastery is possible to at least some degree in this timespan.
Bonan ŝancon!
jesushlincoln 2 years ago 3
Bedaŭrinde, mi tute ne komprenis vian mensaĝon.
Ĝis el Brazilo.
Bira8Fehera 2 years ago
I know that i am not the first that says that, but I studied Esperanto for 20 days and i started to send e-mails in Esperanto.
I studied English for 9 years, use it everyday because i work abroad, and i have problem to understand if this guy of the video is saying bad or good things about Esperanto... (Starting from his pronunciation of: Esp-rantow).
umegghju 2 years ago 11
If only people understood this, everyone wouldn't be so hot on English, which is horrible in the role of 'world language.' English is so illogical and inconsistent and orthographically nightmarish that it's beyond being a joke.
christocr 2 years ago 3
Teller has a mind for language. And never talks in the show.
Does anyone else find that ironic?
CBGB42 2 years ago 13
I personally know a 60 year old woman who lives in a very rural area (Houlton, Maine) who has learned Esperanto in less than three years almost fluently, so if you were to start at the age of 55, it'd be no problem.
Also, I highly recommend Incubus. It's out on DVD now, and it's a trip.
rointo 2 years ago
I didn't like it. Novelty of Shatner wore off, he pronounced Esperanto badly thinking the words in print should be pronounced like French, and the whole arty horror story can't mask the low-budget effects.
Dracopol 2 years ago
For people who think they can't draw, the key book that's been in print for 3 decades is DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN by Betty Edwards. Very wordy, but it talks about how drawing is not in the hands but in your brain and how you must change your attitude to favour the "right hemisphere".
Esperanto really works, it has a very regular grammar, but it is still a language, you need to learn thousands of words, but 10x simpler than learning a European language.
Dracopol 2 years ago
...and there must be more than 20,000 Esperanto-speakers in the world. But the count depends on how you set the bar for language proficiency. Several million have bought instructional books and tapes and videos, so you can say there are several million BEGINNERS. Raise the bar and you could get a million good speakers. They form a network, thinly spread, that's good enough for very interesting hostelling if you go travelling, especially in Eastern Europe.
Dracopol 2 years ago
20.000 ????????? NOOOOOOOOOO
so in Brazil + de 20mil.
20.000 is baby-esperanters.
Bira8Fehera 2 years ago
holy crap you are VERY right when it comes to Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Me and my girlfriend both have it because it is simply true.
flimflam0069 2 years ago
I'm learning Japanese right now, so when I'm done with that Esperanto is next methinks :)
shearoberts 2 years ago
"If you're a libertarian atheist who speaks esperanto..."
Penn, you've just described my dream girl.
thomthum2000 2 years ago 5
The silent partner is the one who is a language expert? That's funny!
I vote you learn Esperanto, Penn. According to the Sidney Culbert study, U. Wa., 2 million people speak it, on par with Lithuanian and Hebrew.
gmbrannan 2 years ago
I'm trying to learn Esperanto. Just putting that out there.
LatumWay 2 years ago
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When someone (example pole speaks english they usally sound ridulous because of their accent).
cartoonhead5 2 years ago
The problem with that is not the English-speaker learning something new, but UNlearning the foul, slurred vowels of English. A European might ask what the fuss is about the vowels. They are defined as the five cardinal or "open" vowels, which don't change during pronunciation. The sample phrase in English is "Ma, may we go too?" Practice associating those sounds with a e i o u respectively. The sounds never change regardless of what's before or after the vowels.
Dracopol 2 years ago 2
Dracopol:
"The sounds never change regardless of what's before or after the vowels."
Like Spanish. Or Italian. Or Portuguese. Etc >.>
wokabomb 2 years ago
You're always talking about how you're uneducated in politics and the sort, so why not learn more on that?
xKeeganxxx 2 years ago
learn lisp
ineptgod 2 years ago
mi kunsentas ke la internacia lingvo taŭgas kiel projekto por mezaĝulo. sed ĝi eĉ pli bone taŭgas por junuloj.... mi mem bedaŭras ke mi ne trovis Esperanton dum mi vere junis...
mikoformiko 2 years ago 2
Vi tute pravas. Mi lernis Esperanton kiel junulo 13jara. Havi amikojn el multaj landoj estis por mi granda plezuro.
allanfineberg 2 years ago 2
Kiel vi lernis?
triniguy999 2 years ago
popolo should lerni esperanto
cartoonhead5 2 years ago
homoj devus lerni esperanton....
mikoformiko 2 years ago
This has been flagged as spam show
1. copy and paste
2. send this to 9 other videos.
3. hold your breath for 10 seconds
4. press refresh twice
3. LOOK AT YOUR BACKGROUND IT WILL BE FREAKY
americancutie10 2 years ago
Should consider lojban.
Traddles000 2 years ago
why do you say esperOnto? it's esperAnto.
anglaismoyen 2 years ago
It's EsperƏnto.
Senpumaru 2 years ago
it shouldn't be; it should be (IPA)- esperanto. one mustn't bring their own accent into another language. you wouldn't speak french with an american accent.
anglaismoyen 2 years ago
Why not? They speak English with a French accent.
Senpumaru 2 years ago
well, english and french are both natural languages and are very different in phonology. however, esperanto was designed to be easy to speak and i don't think it's too much of a stretch just to say "a" instead of "o" (or whatever you think that sound to be).
anglaismoyen 2 years ago
Shipbuilding is an idea. It might be fun to design and build a small craft of your own and take it around a lake.
jericomovie 2 years ago
I'm not sure just how 'deeply different' it would be from what you already know, but sign language would definitely fascinate you.
tinygirl505 2 years ago
I second this motion. I'm learning Esperanto and Sign Language this year with the internet. I think its great fun and a wonderful project and hobby.
amaam89 2 years ago 2
Mi razas min, kaj vi razas vin.
uoregonman 2 years ago
Learn Lojban instead! WAY more interesting and challenging than Esperanto.
Lakmeer 2 years ago
Comment removed
ilaustril 10 months ago
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@Lakmeer Mi konsentas ke lojban estas pli interesa kaj malfacila ol Esperanto, sed gxi ne estas bona kialo de ne lerni Esperanto. Lojban estas preskaux mallernebla. Por lerni Lojban oni devas dedicxi multaj da horoj kaj peno, sed oni povas lerni Esperanto tre rapide kaj sen multe da peno. Se oni havas la bezonata energio, lerni lojban estas unu el la plej bonaj sxatokupoj, sed se ne, lerni Esperanto estas tre bona ankaux.
ilaustril 10 months ago
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@Lakmeer Mi konsentas ke lojban estas pli interesa kaj malfacila ol Esperanto, sed gxi ne estas bona kialo de ne lerni Esperanto. Lojban estas preskaux mallernebla. Por lerni Lojban oni devas dedicxi multaj da horoj kaj peno, sed oni povas lerni Esperanto tre rapide kaj sen multe da peno. Se oni havas la bezonata energio, lerni lojban estas unu el la plej bonaj sxatokupoj, sed se ne, lerni Esperanto estas tre bona ankaux.
ilaustril 10 months ago
your over 55!? wow, your old. i thought you were like 47 or something.
celestialsalamander 3 years ago
You should definately take up Esperanto. Language learning is a great excercise for the brain, and it's fun!
StompinDino 3 years ago
you look really young for a 55 year old o.O
IzzyBunneh 3 years ago 3
Learn Norwegian! Something random like that! It's an interesting language.
saamiland 3 years ago
Snažím se učit česky, ale je to velmi tvrdý jazyk: (
freedom3001 3 years ago
I suggest that you become a bee-keeper. If you read a book on bee-keeping, as with any intelligent, inquisitive person, you'll be hooked. The honeybee's mastery of its model of survival will amaze you. You can do it anywhere- from the desert, to the balcony of a 35th floor New York condo- they will find nectar and honey and they will persist.
I wondered why, when the Sherlock Homes retired, he became a bee keeper. When I got my first hives, I understood. It is a thinking person's pursuit.
scafativ 3 years ago 2
Yes, perhaps you should learn Esperanto, if nothing else only because it will make learning other languages easier.
Damien0xFF 3 years ago 6
@Damien0xFF Bonege diris!
ilaustril 10 months ago
you have A good outlook on life.
burntrubber11 3 years ago 3
Mi parolas Esperanton.Mi lernis ghin en Shtata Universitato en Kanariaj Insuloj.Pere de la internacia lingvo mi havis multajn avantaghojn: amuzighis,gajnis sufiche da mono,konis aliajn landojn kaj kulturojn, trovis multajn geamikojn k.t.p. Do mi konsilas al vi lerni la lingvon por esti pli felicha.Saluton de Tony Sar!
ansardom 3 years ago 3
This comment has received too many negative votes show
Learn to speak the truth in English for a start, you fat fuck dancing monkey propagandist for fascists. Remember Julius Streicher never expected to be hung at Nuremberg.
tonzimala 3 years ago
Penn, learn Vietnamese. It's a very musical language, and is different enough that people find it very interesting.
I speak Vietnamese, Japanese, Spanish & English.
-Radar
ptireland 3 years ago 2
Cómo y donde aprendiste español? Yo también lo hablo (porque vivo en México) y también hablo Esperanto! Esperanto es el mejor idioma del muuuundo, pero español siempre será mi primer amor ñ_ñ
GringaEnMexico 3 years ago
Do you think being an Esperantist necessarily means you're an athiest? A person who believes in some omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent intelligence does not necessarily subscribe to religion. Even if they do, does this mean they cannot or should not learn Esperanto?
Anyone can learn Esperanto, it is the heritage of all human beings, regardless of your beliefs.
AquarianAscent 3 years ago 2
yeah but Penn is an atheist....that's why he said it.
rpm2004 3 years ago
Do it! within a college semester's time you will have mastered Esperanto and then you can go on to another discipline: wine-making, fencing or another language.
feverfresh 3 years ago
Hey Penn!
I spent my spare time in Junior High learning the Elvish Language, you know, the one featured in JRR Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings". I used some resources from the web, and also a small red book with white print on the front from Barnes and Noble. Using the books and films, it was really fun to be able to write things using the elvish alphabet and understand what was said in the beautiful Elvish language.
Just a suggestion.
Cheers
Sarah
sarah95pekoe 3 years ago
The use of Esperanto was counseled by UNESCO for two conventions, by personalyties as Einstein, Umberto Eco, Ghandi and others, a lot of Nobel prizes are/was esperantists, Esperanto itself was proposed to Nobel Prize in last year, and it is teached in more than 25 universities only here in Europe, and used by millions of people all over the world. It is not a stupid waste of time, it is the only solution to world comunication that really works.
oksigeno 3 years ago 2
esperanto can be used to translate web pages - just build your site in esperanto and it can be easily translated to any language automatically.
And funny fact - Ludwik Zamenhof who invented esperanto had to do it again because his father burned notebook with it (well, he just reconstructed language from his memory).
grraadd 3 years ago 3
Learn to be as aggressive about giving as you have been about taking.
bc9021010001 3 years ago 4
This comment has received too many negative votes show
You represent my views in public, quite well. At least 60% overlap on the important stuff, which is really great. Esperanto is BS. Learn Papau Cannibal-speak before learning Esperanto. Or get a cybernetic implant and learn machine pulses, like Kevin Warwick, since that's REALLY cutting edge... LOL
heywoodjablohme 3 years ago
Because obviously Papau Cannibal-speak (if there's even such a thing) is spoken by more than a million people worldwide...
Rogier274 3 years ago
This comment has received too many negative votes show
If you want to learn a useless language with cool uses, learn latin and then get a bunch of Petersen field guides. Seriously, then you can get clues from the trees to remember their names. It's fun. I can teach you how to draw. Scientific Illustration method can teach anyone how to draw using logic, grids, and the sci-ill continuous tone technique (circular technique). Of course, you won't learn how to do sketchy bullshit, but how to literally represent reality, which can then be abstracted.
heywoodjablohme 3 years ago
Wow, what a magnificent way to draw. Put a USB cable up your ass and your a plug-and-play printer! :P
fixfaxr 3 years ago
Bla-bla-bla, internet, impossible, idealistic, bla-bla-bla, environmentalists, bla-bla, idealistics, bla-bla, open-source, stupid idealistics, bla-bla, you can't stop the trends, and the trend is the real learnable, neutral, international linguage. Ghis la venonta UK kara.
oksigeno 3 years ago 3
latin or you lose
hjeremy2222 3 years ago
There's also Interlingua
TheClassicalLiberal 3 years ago
I speak esperanto and has a lot o friend thanks to it.
Bjokac 3 years ago
Mi konsentas. Mi ankaux havas multajn amikojn.
andogigi5 3 years ago 3
This comment has received too many negative votes show
Esperanto is like, spanish, fucked with bad German, and english.
learn Finnish.
Lamnont 3 years ago
No it's not.
Rogier274 3 years ago 2
You could learn Klingon.
Civil1zation 3 years ago
You should go for cooking, man. It's arty and practical, plus the ladies love a man who can cook. Yeah, I know you're married and all but it's never too late to impress her.
Rystefn 3 years ago
get your daughters names tatoos onto your shoulders, in weird languages
deanobeany 3 years ago
yeah right, i remember a joke where this guy said he doesn't trust Chinese script because he doesn't know what it means and doesn't trust anyone to tell them. He imagines getting them and walk among some Chinese who see it and giggle going "Ha! You Salt and Peppa?!" Best to learn the language to make sure you know what it means.
HammandClov 3 years ago
he's a man of the world, why not just find a freind who speaks the language, or if tatoos arent his thing, then dont worry bout it, its just trivial
deanobeany 3 years ago
what do "man of the world" got to do with anything? He wants to learn something, not get his kids names in a language he doesn't speak. That's just dumb anyway. And Penn doesn't even look like the tattoo person type. I just mentioned the danger of it, that's all and here you say it's trivial even though YOU suggested it.
HammandClov 3 years ago
Learn thinking. It will be a world's first.
ksol000 3 years ago
You should learn Lojban, esperanto has many flaws and the grammar of Lojban is based on boolean algebra. No ambiguity though so I'm not sure that you would be a big fan. It's mostly a nerds' language.
Gammaclipper 3 years ago
Screw the Esperanto and learn some deluxe cooking. The ladies would dig that much more.
cinndave 3 years ago
You can do it, Penn!
You should do an episode of Bullshit about English being the "world's language".
gxeremio 3 years ago 6
Learning Esperanto, will be much easier, now that there are LOADS of resources online. Heck, I learned within a couple weeks through a free online course.
Bonan lernado!
amadeus5521 3 years ago 6
Esperanto ? .....Copasetic
stjakk 3 years ago
how about learning how to knit...a lot of guys do that.
whitelighterangel78 3 years ago
Learn Dungeons and Dragons. Go. Explore vast, uncharted lands with your imagination as the horizon. Or, at least, visit a reality that doesn't suck as much as this one.
Mudkipia 3 years ago 2
Hand over your Vorpal sword
pennsays 3 years ago
I'll gladly give in your honor, though.
Mudkipia 3 years ago
Know the universal method to win at Dungeons & Dragons? Cast a Chain Lightning spell, then cast Speak With Dead so they can't lie, and then Resurrect those you shouldn't have killed in the first place!
Other D&D joke: the two worst names for your D&D character: 1) Sailbad the Sinner, and 2) Elvish Parsley.
Dracopol 2 years ago
Want to learn some astronomy? Buy HA REYs "THE STARS". Any idiot, including me, can go out and find every constellation with it.
drmcgray 3 years ago
w00t viewer 1000, muhahahah
BTW, Teller was a professor?? did he use sign language? ROFL, j/k
xpo147 3 years ago 2
believe it or not he can talk lol
intindse 3 years ago
I know, hehe, but I just had to say it :P
xpo147 3 years ago
In a way, learning a new language will be a lot like learning your upright bass. If you don't practice regularly you can forget very quickly. I wouldn't bother to learn a new language unless I planned to spend time in an area where its the common language.
DiavoloDiAno 3 years ago
20,000 know Esperanto? You'd be able to communicate with more people if you learned Klingon.
Esperanto is still very heavily influenced by Latin and does not seem to friendly to East Asian native speakers.
sorienor 3 years ago
Hunting, there's always room for another blood brother at tribe Nuge!
I'm sure uncle Ted would be happy to teach you everything you need to know and you could take your bass with you so when you're not hunting you and uncle Ted could come up with some jazz motor city rock fusion!
truxton1 3 years ago
It's so ironic that the silent one has the world class linguistic skills.
FlowCell 3 years ago 3
Try Elementary Particle Physics. I've always been interested in how the universe 'really' exists.
ghosttwo2 3 years ago
I speak Esperanto pretty fluently and I stopped speaking it because it's fucking dumb. It's the socialism of languages - the whole thing is a command-and-control approach to something that already has an emergent (market-oriented) solution. People on the whole think it is more worthwhile to learn languages already in common use (English, Spanish, German) than something that Zamenhof thought would be "easier". The market has spoken.
InanePseudonym 3 years ago
But that's not an argument against Esperanto- it's an argument against the usefulness of Esperanto as an international auxiliary language. There are many other perfectly good reasons to learn it (interest in planned languages, access to literature, aesthetic appeal, Pasporta Servo, etc.)
You don't have to believe in Zamenhof's ideology in order to appreciate his language. :)
qwertyuiop726 3 years ago 6
Yeah, I agree with that, but one of the problems there is that most of the people you will be able to speak to will be talking about how great Esperanto is. I am not sure that I regret learning Esperanto, it's an interesting thing to bring up at parties (and I certainly didn't do it to usher in a new age or anything), but I stopped using it long ago because none of the conversations were interesting. Plus, it's not much harder to learn Spanish or German than it is to learn Esperanto.
InanePseudonym 3 years ago
"most of the people you will be able to speak to will be talking about how great Esperanto is."
I'm with ya on that one. I still enjoy Esperanto as a minor hobby/skill/curiosity, but I'm no longer active in the community because many aspects of it were too obsessive and cultish for my tastes.
"it's not much harder to learn Spanish or German than it is to learn Esperanto."
Exactly! To me, there's no such thing as a "hard" or "easy" language; just similar or different to what you already know.
qwertyuiop726 3 years ago
"it's not much harder to learn Spanish or German than it is to learn Esperanto." - LOL!
oksigeno 3 years ago
As one who's studied Spanish and German (and other national languages), I can say with certainty that you're wrong when you say: "Plus, it's not much harder to learn Spanish or German than it is to learn Esperanto." (Unless you are unusually talented at learning languages.) Esperanto is the first and only foreign language I've become fluent in besides English.
goulo 3 years ago