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PowerElectronix 12 hours ago [-]
I don't wanna preach how to raise children, but picking esperanto as a second language to teach the kids is going to be a very uphill battle.
It's not the native language of anyone, especially in the family so they are not going to be as exposed to it as one would in a family with a non- english native. And then there's no esperanto anywhere else so they are going to learn quickly they don't need it at all except for when daddy says something in esperanto.
odyssey7 11 hours ago [-]
If you want to gift your children with an extra language, the real benefit is unlocking a part of the world and its culture for them.
Esperanto in this case is less of a gift to the child, and more of a self-expression of the parents’ worldview.
The author kind of acknowledges something about this.
> In Canada, it would make a lot more sense to raise the kids speaking French. If I had been more organized and forward-thinking, I could have raised them as native French speakers. I would have needed to prepare and study French but that didn’t even occur to me when Mira was born. I was fluent in English and Esperanto, I wanted Mira to be bilingual, and so I taught her Esperanto.
I don’t buy this argument. It boils down to, yes it would have been better to teach a different language, but the parent didn’t want to do the work of learning French, so the child got something that wasn’t nearly as beneficial instead. Children are capable of acquiring a second language for quite a bit longer than it takes a committed adult to become fluent in French.
lixtra 11 hours ago [-]
Rare languages form a tighter community. Nobody will treat you as inner circle for speaking English or French. Another Esperanto speaker will have a very different attitude towards you.
Plus, I would expect French to be easier to learn for a good esperanto speaker.
It’s a risky bet, but it’s totally fine to take it.
odyssey7 10 hours ago [-]
Wherever you live in the world, there are thousands of languages that are rare where you live and also link into centuries of community and culture and a beautiful country.
Why gamble on your child’s behalf that their life will be better off for knowing one of the very few rare languages that do not come with any of those benefits? So you can feel cool at Esperanto conventions? If you teach them Polish instead, for example, then they will have a lot of opportunities to eat pierogis and could someday meet the love of their life on a vacation in Poland — sounds a like a much safer gamble to make on your child’s behalf than to dedicate their critical period to Esperanto conventions.
lIl-IIIl 12 hours ago [-]
It is a native language of a few thousand people, per the article.
Most Esperanto natives are from parents who don't speak each other's native language and use Esperanto to communicate.
senorrib 11 hours ago [-]
That's not what "native language" means, tho. They can be fluent, but by definition there's literally nobody _natively_ speaking Esperanto.
TFNA 11 hours ago [-]
Within linguistics, there is a small but respected body of research on these children born to Esperantist parents, and the term "native speaker" is commonly employed (though even for natural languages that term is problematic, so "L1 speaker" might be preferred). Particularly within Europe, the parents are taking the kids to the periodic meetups with other families, so those kids are getting the same amount of exposure to the language within a community as city kids brought back to rural grandparents' house for holidays.
tgv 8 hours ago [-]
Except there's no media in Esperanto that can compete with the dominant language. And there surely are other factors, such as that the parents are unlikely to be really fluent in most cases. Labeling it as native or L1 is following a loose definition strictly.
TFNA 8 hours ago [-]
Esperanto doesn't have to compete with the dominant language to merit the distinction L1. One of the reason that label is favoured these days is that in multilingual societies and families, a child can be exposed to multiple languages and of course some will be dominant, but they are still learned during that childhood phase.
Viliam1234 8 hours ago [-]
Competing with big languages is difficult for smaller languages, but that is not specific for Esperanto.
growing up bilingual is much easier when your immediate family / community speak the "first language"
now that im surrounded by Americans, its much harder to justify the mental load of teaching a non-scholastic second language when there is no community to reinforce what youve learned beyond rote learning exercises. im not convinced multiple languages made me smarter either...
joshdavham 12 hours ago [-]
> im not convinced multiple languages made me smarter either...
I used to work in the language learning space, and I personally think that the idea that speaking multiple languages makes you smarter is mostly a myth. It definitely does expand your mind a bit and gives you the ability to express some ideas more concisely, but I don’t feel like it’s made me smarter in the same way that learning to code, or reading books has.
TFNA 12 hours ago [-]
Learning foreign languages can spur you to read more books, and books you might not have read before, thereby making you more informed.
Recently I learned Arabic to directly work with some sources in my branch of academia, and to be a better guest who can make some basic conversation when I travel to über-hospitable Arab countries. But going through the reading selections in my Classical Arabic textbooks revealed a whole canon of interesting literature on Middle East and world history over centuries. I have been eating that stuff up, and I probably never would have learned about it through languages I already knew; indeed a striking amount has never been translated.
dashee 11 hours ago [-]
I don't agree that you should necessarily feel smarter by speaking multiple languages. The health benefits are well-established. For example, bilingualism is known to delay the onset of Alzheimer's, though the strength of the effect is dependent one's use of those languages (actively speaking vs passive knowledge).
I suppose you could liken it to eating nuts more regularly. It might not make you feel healthier, but physiologically it is doing that.
joshdavham 7 hours ago [-]
That fact about multilingualism helping delay or reduce the chances of Alzheimer’s / dementia is cited pretty often.
I’m willing to accept it, but I’m more skeptical of multilingualism actually making one smarter or otherwise more cognitively capable.
And that’s a good analogy about eating nuts. It’s possible that while acquiring a second language could make you smarter, it might not subjectively make you feel smarter.
markvdb 11 hours ago [-]
Early childhood multilingualism does at least yield some brain flexibility.
Speaking multiple languages also opens doors to very different cultural spaces. I know it has enriched my world view. That has made me if not smarter, then at least wiser.
usermyuser 12 hours ago [-]
I didn’t know my excellent former Linear Algebra professor spoke Esperanto, but it totally fits!
joshdavham 6 hours ago [-]
The hacker news community I find is actually a smaller, more tightly-knit community than it appears. I’ve also bumped into a bunch of people I know on here and have had others say that they’ve spotted me in a thread.
I think the online community of productive, computer/math nerds is actually quite small haha
joshdavham 12 hours ago [-]
Given that the parents aren’t native Esperanto speakers themselves, would this make the version of Esperanto that the children speak a sort of Creole?
It's not the native language of anyone, especially in the family so they are not going to be as exposed to it as one would in a family with a non- english native. And then there's no esperanto anywhere else so they are going to learn quickly they don't need it at all except for when daddy says something in esperanto.
Esperanto in this case is less of a gift to the child, and more of a self-expression of the parents’ worldview.
The author kind of acknowledges something about this.
> In Canada, it would make a lot more sense to raise the kids speaking French. If I had been more organized and forward-thinking, I could have raised them as native French speakers. I would have needed to prepare and study French but that didn’t even occur to me when Mira was born. I was fluent in English and Esperanto, I wanted Mira to be bilingual, and so I taught her Esperanto.
I don’t buy this argument. It boils down to, yes it would have been better to teach a different language, but the parent didn’t want to do the work of learning French, so the child got something that wasn’t nearly as beneficial instead. Children are capable of acquiring a second language for quite a bit longer than it takes a committed adult to become fluent in French.
It’s a risky bet, but it’s totally fine to take it.
Why gamble on your child’s behalf that their life will be better off for knowing one of the very few rare languages that do not come with any of those benefits? So you can feel cool at Esperanto conventions? If you teach them Polish instead, for example, then they will have a lot of opportunities to eat pierogis and could someday meet the love of their life on a vacation in Poland — sounds a like a much safer gamble to make on your child’s behalf than to dedicate their critical period to Esperanto conventions.
Most Esperanto natives are from parents who don't speak each other's native language and use Esperanto to communicate.
Here are some media in Esperanto:
https://dvd.ikso.net/pagxo/en/libro.html
https://dvd.ikso.net/pagxo/en/muziko.html
now that im surrounded by Americans, its much harder to justify the mental load of teaching a non-scholastic second language when there is no community to reinforce what youve learned beyond rote learning exercises. im not convinced multiple languages made me smarter either...
I used to work in the language learning space, and I personally think that the idea that speaking multiple languages makes you smarter is mostly a myth. It definitely does expand your mind a bit and gives you the ability to express some ideas more concisely, but I don’t feel like it’s made me smarter in the same way that learning to code, or reading books has.
Recently I learned Arabic to directly work with some sources in my branch of academia, and to be a better guest who can make some basic conversation when I travel to über-hospitable Arab countries. But going through the reading selections in my Classical Arabic textbooks revealed a whole canon of interesting literature on Middle East and world history over centuries. I have been eating that stuff up, and I probably never would have learned about it through languages I already knew; indeed a striking amount has never been translated.
I suppose you could liken it to eating nuts more regularly. It might not make you feel healthier, but physiologically it is doing that.
I’m willing to accept it, but I’m more skeptical of multilingualism actually making one smarter or otherwise more cognitively capable.
And that’s a good analogy about eating nuts. It’s possible that while acquiring a second language could make you smarter, it might not subjectively make you feel smarter.
Speaking multiple languages also opens doors to very different cultural spaces. I know it has enriched my world view. That has made me if not smarter, then at least wiser.
I think the online community of productive, computer/math nerds is actually quite small haha