Teaching & Learning. Part One

» rik - Teaching & Learning

When Zamenhof first launched Esperanto he had to describe it by reference to Latin grammar. He had no alternative. Language study at that time in Europe was Latin -based. However those 16 rules are not a good description today of an agglutinative language. Surprisingly when I started to learn Japanese, I found much in common between Japanese and Esperanto.Often I found it easier to translate a Japanese sentence into Esperanto than into English.Later I found that even most text books for teaching Esperanto to Japanese also taught Esperanto as a Romance language.
I then roughed oout a system for teaching Esperanto based on Japanese sentence structure. It may seem ridiculous and impudent for someone who has only a rudimentary knowledge of japanese to do this but it may be that just because Japanese is foreign to me that I can see things which fluent speakers just take for granted. I would like to experiment further with the help of a Japanese Esperantist some time

-- posted by rik

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» Labestul - Re: Teaching & Learning

In response to message posted by rik:

When I first started to learn Japanese I had heard of but did not know Esperanto. I did however note several interesting features about Japanese which distinguished it from the languages which I did know at the time: English, French, and some German.

Many years later I began to learn Korean and was amazed to find that Korean and Japanese are very similar in their basic structures (e.g. the use of post positions and the SOV sentence order). Also a significant portion of their respective vocabularies come from Chinese. Also those unusual features (unusual for someone like me who had a limited occidental linguistics background) of Japanese were also found in Korean. One interesting example is the Japanese sequence of three demonstratives (Kore, Sore, and Are: meaning roughly: "here", "there by you", and "there away from us both". This is found also in Korean.

I had imagined that this was a strictly "oriental" manner of thinking because it did not appear in either English, French, or German. Of course as it turns out I was mistaken since this feature I am told is found both in Latin and in Spanish. My recent experience of living in Brazil and learning Portuguese showed me that it is also true in Portuguese.

I subsequently learned Esperanto and I agree that a Japanese/Korean approach to teaching/learning Esperanto has a lot of merit. It is also worthwhile pointing out here that William Auld's approach to learning Esperanto (his text was reviewed earlier in this series of articles) is more in the spirit of this Korean/Japanese approach.

Actually I had started to write a book (which I will one day finish I hope) which would examine each of the majors features of Japanese/Korean which were not found in Esperanto and were also the "so-called oriental" features that I first noted. I would then suggest a modification Esperanto to handle these:

For example based on the KORE, SORE, ARE series
I would introduce the words CXO and CXA to be added to CXI giving the Esperanto series: CXI TIE, CXO TIE, and CXA TIE where TIE alone would cover both the CXO and CXA forms as it in effect does in standard everyday Esperanto.

These "changes" to Esperanto would first be described and then discussed in my book. Ultimately I would give my opinion on them. In particular my opinion on this suggestion is that it is not necessary and probably not good. Zamenhof was certainly familiar with Latin and therefore knew about this distinction and chose not to incorporate it into Esperanto.

The purpose of this book would be encourage active discussion among Japanese and Korean learners of Esperanto who probably would have lots of formal education in English wether they could actually use English or not. The example that I cited above was in fact used in a discussion session I lead among Japanese and Korean Esperantists in one of the KUNLOGXADOj in Kita Kyushu. The general reaction of the participants was also that this was NOT a good idea!

Well this message is already too long and perhaps a bit off topic though I hope that it is of interest to those reading this forum.

David, I will send you a private email later this week with some of my thoughts on teaching English as a second language based on my experiences in Japan and Korea.

-- posted by Labestul

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