Language Learning

While I do most of what blogging I do at my own site, and it's usually political in nature, I occasionally post about Esperanto, and thought I would crosspost to my ELNA blog this particular essay on the propaedeutic (Esperanto: lernhelpa) effect of Esperanto on the learning of other languages. This was originally posted on January 12, 2007.

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I had an interesting discussion at lunch today with a couple of other Esperanto speakers, on the topic of teaching the language in schools. Esperanto is, of course, one of the great untold educational stories of the century (so far). We discussed two questions: is Esperanto easier than other languages to learn? And: can it contribute to the learning of other languages? Learning languages in the United States is something to which we all give lip-service, but which in fact is heavily ignored in our schools, and it seems to me that anything that can help should be at least looked at.

On the first question, I remember a little folder I picked up back in 1988, on the teaching of foreign languages in California public schools. One section gave milestones that students were expected to reach at the end of each year of study, through four years — I vaguely remember a recommendation to double the times for "Slavic, Semitic and other non-European languages" (sic!). More seriously, I remember that the annual milestones given were the milestones that anyone who has taught — or learned — Esperanto would expect to reach in an equivalent number of months — yes, "M" for "Mother" months. There is no question in my mind, or from my experience, that Esperanto is easier to learn than any other foreign language, and that we're talking at least one order of magnitude here (double that for "Slavic, Semitic and other non-European languages").

Does this help American language learning? Probably not a whole lot. The argument will be made (incorrectly!) that Esperanto is not a very useful language to learn; in fact, it is a lot more useful than it is usually given credit for, but on a national scale we'd rather have our kids learning Chinese or Arabic, I think (though most of our kids end up with Spanish — relatively useful — or French or German, far less useful languages even, I think, than Esperanto). So can Esperanto help with learning these other languages? There have been experiments that invariably suggest that yes, it can. This is known as the propaedeutic effect — the learning of a first foreign language always helps with the learning of later languages.

This is hardly unique to Esperanto; the student who learns Spanish first will learn French — or Arabic, or Chinese — much more quickly later. My take on the matter is that (a) in learning his first foreign language, the student learns the mental tools he needs to learn a foreign language in general, and (b) when he successfully learns his first foreign language, the student overcomes a psychological barrier that says "a foreign language is an academic subject, not to be treated in the same way that I treat my mother tongue, the topic of exams, not of conversation". The advantage of Esperanto is not that it can do these things, but that it can do them so much more quickly than other first foreign languages — based on the figures I quote above, you can see that a year of Esperanto is the equivalent of a number of years of study of some other language.

As I said, there've been experiments that show this assumption to be at least anecdotally valid — all the experiments done have shown this. My favorite was the one that went on for a number of years at a high school in Manchester, England. The headmaster, who was a speaker of Esperanto, regular split the incoming class into those who started out with French and those who started out with a year of Esperanto and then switched to French. The results: at the end of three years, the French-only students were generally about one lesson (only one lesson!) ahead of the Esperanto starters; and, more importantly (though less easily quantifiable) the Esperanto starters were generally more active in class, in terms of conversation in the language. During my period of following the literature, similar experiments in Somero, Finland (Finnish to German via Esperanto) and Paderborn, Germany (German to English via Esperanto) gave similar results.

Again, this is one of the great undiscovered stories about language teaching of our time. Why it remains undiscovered is, perhaps, an even better story, and has to do, to some degree, with politics, both high-level and low-level school politics. But maybe I'll tell that some other time.