Esperanto is super fast/easy to learn, as in if you don't have good lessons you will take longer BUT it's still so simple that you don't actually need good lessons, you'll figure it out fast enough even without them. So, after one year or even much less - if you work at it or if your lessons are particularly awesome - you can be fluent in Esperanto.
Learning is just a skill that's equal parts how YOU study/practise and parts how THEY teach you. Unfortunately 99% of all lessons today for every language are absolute shit, and I could rant forever about this, but basically they do stuff like say that Japanese and Indonesian have adjectives - which they don't. When you claim something exists that doesn't, it complicates things and makes you misunderstand the entire language, so you're not seeing things in any like a native is and that also means you don't use the language in the same way.
Then they do things like write "this means puppy, library, policeman" instead of "this means little dog, book-collection-place, law-regulator-man". Or they write "this means leaf, branch, trunk, tree..." instead of "this means tree-stuff". Surprise, when you don't do stuff like literally break up the words then you take a lot longer to learn and the whole language seems a lot scarier. When you don't actually give the real definition, the usage of words takes a lot longer to learn.
For example, people are surprised that the colour "blue" in Japanese also means "green". Well it's obvious if you look at the word's history - it actually means "sea-colour, ocean-colour". Likewise, yellow is "amber-colour" (ranging from yellow to brown to red, so the dictionary will say yellow but then it might get used for brown-red hair). But when you simply learn it as "blue, yellow" then of course you get confused later.
Then there's in what order they teach you. If you learn words according to frequency, as in make or find a list of the most frequent words (ex. for Indonesian I gathered about a million words by copy-pasting various fanfics into a text file, then threw it into a word frequency generator), and learn the most frequent words first, surprise, you learn faster because learning a language is like creating a net and filling in the "gaps" of what you know. What you learn first NEEDS to be the most useful stuff so that you can start getting the gist of things ASAP. You can learn everything else through context.
Finally the main problem is the (modern) utter lack of attention on things like etymology and pronunciation. For example, let's take a word like "samukunakatta" in japanese - it's translated as "wasn't cold". In modern textbooks, you're supposed to learn this as if it's a single verb form. Actually, this is three separate verbs stuck together.
"samuki (old form, the modern is "samui" because the k was lost but the k is retained in other forms of the same verb) means "is cold". Long story short, its form when reliant on another verb that follows for its exact time meaning (tense) etc is "samuku".
"nai - non-existing" (verb), turns into "naku" (reliant form). The final u is removed for ease of pronunciation, something that occurs often in Japanese with the syllable "ku", to then make simply "nak".
"atta" is the past-tense form of "aru - exists" (verb).
So we're literally saying "samuku nak atta" = the non-existance of cold existed = "it wasn't cold".
Furthermore, this "atta" is really a combination of "ari - an existance" and "ta - already happened; past tense". Now, "arita" turns into "atta" due to basic pronunciation rules.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2015-09-19 12:53 am (UTC)Learning is just a skill that's equal parts how YOU study/practise and parts how THEY teach you. Unfortunately 99% of all lessons today for every language are absolute shit, and I could rant forever about this, but basically they do stuff like say that Japanese and Indonesian have adjectives - which they don't. When you claim something exists that doesn't, it complicates things and makes you misunderstand the entire language, so you're not seeing things in any like a native is and that also means you don't use the language in the same way.
Then they do things like write "this means puppy, library, policeman" instead of "this means little dog, book-collection-place, law-regulator-man". Or they write "this means leaf, branch, trunk, tree..." instead of "this means tree-stuff". Surprise, when you don't do stuff like literally break up the words then you take a lot longer to learn and the whole language seems a lot scarier. When you don't actually give the real definition, the usage of words takes a lot longer to learn.
For example, people are surprised that the colour "blue" in Japanese also means "green". Well it's obvious if you look at the word's history - it actually means "sea-colour, ocean-colour". Likewise, yellow is "amber-colour" (ranging from yellow to brown to red, so the dictionary will say yellow but then it might get used for brown-red hair). But when you simply learn it as "blue, yellow" then of course you get confused later.
Then there's in what order they teach you. If you learn words according to frequency, as in make or find a list of the most frequent words (ex. for Indonesian I gathered about a million words by copy-pasting various fanfics into a text file, then threw it into a word frequency generator), and learn the most frequent words first, surprise, you learn faster because learning a language is like creating a net and filling in the "gaps" of what you know. What you learn first NEEDS to be the most useful stuff so that you can start getting the gist of things ASAP. You can learn everything else through context.
Finally the main problem is the (modern) utter lack of attention on things like etymology and pronunciation. For example, let's take a word like "samukunakatta" in japanese - it's translated as "wasn't cold". In modern textbooks, you're supposed to learn this as if it's a single verb form. Actually, this is three separate verbs stuck together.
"samuki (old form, the modern is "samui" because the k was lost but the k is retained in other forms of the same verb) means "is cold". Long story short, its form when reliant on another verb that follows for its exact time meaning (tense) etc is "samuku".
"nai - non-existing" (verb), turns into "naku" (reliant form). The final u is removed for ease of pronunciation, something that occurs often in Japanese with the syllable "ku", to then make simply "nak".
"atta" is the past-tense form of "aru - exists" (verb).
So we're literally saying "samuku nak atta" = the non-existance of cold existed = "it wasn't cold".
Furthermore, this "atta" is really a combination of "ari - an existance" and "ta - already happened; past tense". Now, "arita" turns into "atta" due to basic pronunciation rules.