Judith's language learning blog

I’m not sure if you heard of Hunch, it’s a pretty cool free site to help you come to decisions about just about anything. I created several “quizzes” (decision-making engines) about language-learning there and I’d appreciate your feedback – you can also just make an account on Hunch and start improving those quizzes.

What should my next foreign language be? (considering 45 languages so far, I’d appreciate help adding others)
Should I learn Esperanto?
How can I learn a foreign language? (evaluating your aptitude for self-study, classroom study, study abroad etc.)
Which program should I use to learn a new language? (still very sketchy)

Considering the audience of this blog, you may also like Which non-English movie should I watch?

I always notice that mastery of the affixes is essential for understanding Esperanto and for speaking it fluently. The thing is that many Esperanto speakers never have a very big vocabulary… but you don’t need one if you have fully mastered the affixes. Sometimes I even wish that German or English or other languages had a reliable affix system like this, because I start a sentence and find that I’ve temporarily forgotten a word, or it’s on the tip of my tongue and I just can’t get it out. Let’s say it’s the word “auxlo” (= auditorium). If you have trouble coming up with that word in Esperanto, you can continue speaking without a noticeable stop and people won’t even know you’ve been missing a word, because you’d say something like “prelegejo” (prelegi+ejo = to lecture + place = lecture-place) and that’s a perfectly fine way of expressing yourself. In fact, it’s considered good language usage to say “prelegejo” instead of “auxlo”, because it enables beginners to understand more easily, particularly if they come from a non-Indo-European language background.

Since it’s so crucial to understand agglutinated words quickly and to be able to come up with some yourself without much thinking, I’ve decided to post some exercises here for you to improve your understanding of Esperanto affixes…

I thought I’d share some of my favourite resources for Esperanto. I will divide this into information for the might-be-interested, study materials for the definitely-interested and cultural resources for those who have actually learned at least some Esperanto.

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You might think so, seeing just how much media attention Esperanto has been getting this end of July 2009.

The most detailed coverage comes from Germany’s number-one public TV station ARD, which aired this report on the Esperanto World Youth Congress, with both the reporter and the news host speaking very good Esperanto.

Also very unexpected is this BBC news article about Esperanto with a special focus on its role in reconciliation between Jews and Arabs.

Then, Deutsche Welle published two favourable articles on Esperanto within a single week: Esperantists keep the dream alive, prompted by the Esperanto World Congress now taking place in Poland, and The future of Esperanto looks bright according to our readers, a collection of sent-in testimonials.

Also prompted by the Esperanto World Congress, the British Times Online titled Conference proves that Esperanto can be the language of love. Of course since the conference is taking place in Poland, Polskie Radio also reports on it and the European Jewish Press also reports. Even Chinese Xinhua news agency tried to report about the congress, but mixed up the articles.

EDIT: Another reader informed me that the Taipei Times also had a bilingual article related to the Esperanto World Congress at the beginning of July. Read it here.

EDIT: It seems I missed a lot of nice articles because they were in the countries’ national languages, reaching more readers this way. A brief listing, for those who can read these languages:
Chinese: The missing Xinhua article, in Chinese
French: Radio France Internationale, Libération, several regional papers also wrote about this
Korean: Korean TV station YTN
Lithuanian: Bernardinai
Polish: Lots, search Gazeta.pl for Esperanto for a start.
Portugese: Veja, Acoriano Oriental
Turkish: Salom

UPDATE: The Austrian newspaper Der Standard just published an by the Kuwait Times, by China Daily and by Dawn.com. What’s amazing is that these articles are not copycats, they each seem to have done their own research and their own interviews.

Finally, for reasons still unknown to me, one of the top stories in the Birmingham Mail is about two Esperanto speakers, one from Birmingham, getting married
next year. Would they have been written about if they had been brought together by a shared love of beer?

Esperanto speakers, mark the time. Could it be that journalists are the first to know that Esperanto is hot?

Non-Esperanto speakers, are you curious to see what Esperanto is like now? Try this free lecture, this site with lots of answers or free comprehensive online courses.

German – my native language, which I also teach at GermanPod101.com, Edufire and Myngle.

English – I speak it totally effortlessly and at a near-native level, but employing a curious mix of British, Scottish, Canadian and American vocabulary and pronunciations. Never managed to keep them apart in my head.

Esperanto – my third strongest language. I speak it as a secret language with my boyfriend and I’ve been attending more and more international meetings as well. I had to resign as a board member of Edukado@Interreto (Esperanto-based educational non-profit org) though because of lack of time. See my online Esperanto classes, also I wrote most of the articles for Esperanto.info.

French – I’m basically fluent and my degree involves reading lots of French literature classics in the original. I would appreciate the chance to practise speaking it more often though, especially with French Canadians because I love their accent and would like to copy it.

Latin – I can read it fluently and have taught Latin for more than 7 years. I’m not one of those who’d have conversations in Latin though, that’s what Esperanto is for. Check out my Latin classes on Edufire!

Italian – Studied it for 3 years at high school, after which I spoke it pretty much fluently and got an A- in my final oral exam. However, since 2003 I have used it at most once a year and now it’s seriously rusty. I would love to revive it.

Chinese – Following a summer course in Beijing and some serious studying in Germany, I can get by in Mandarin. At this point I know approximately 1500 characters and am always working on that. I study lots of characters at once, then counter it by studying lots of texts or textbook dialogs and also taking conversational lessons.

Modern Greek – I initially started learning Greek from and because of a friend, with whom I’ve been out of touch for a while now. I still like the language though, take the occasional Greek lessons on Myngle and try to at least not let it fall into disuse. At the moment I’d classify myself an upper beginner.

Arabic, Indonesian, Maori, Spanish, Swahili – All languages that call out to me and that I’ve studied at some point or am still studying on occasion. I’m a beginner in all of them. For Swahili I’m trying to study Assimil every day, but something always comes up…

Czech, Dutch, Lithuanian, Swedish – Studied these for concrete purposes, such as upcoming travels, but they don’t really call out to me and I’ve already forgotten everything or almost everything I learned. I can still understand Dutch because of my German of course, and same goes for most Romance languages.

In a perfect world, I’d be speaking all of the world’s known languages by the time I die (yes I am a Unilang member), but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I don’t have a talent for languages, just an immense love for them. I’ll give it a shot.