Re:‘Saluton’: the surprise return of Esperanto
by yorwba on Thursday December 28, 2017 @04:01AM
(#16021055)
Here's a review of one of the studies in the Wikipedia article I wrote some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019
It appears that a certain jcranmer was also in that thread. Hi!
To summarize: low sample size, confounding factors and mixed results mean that there's no strong evidence to suggest learning Esperanto helps more with learning another foreign language than directly starting to learn that language.
Re:‘Saluton’: the surprise return of Esperanto
by adrianN on Thursday December 28, 2017 @06:08AM
(#16021437)
That's really interesting. You should probably incorporate your findings in the Wikipedia article. It definitely lacks a critical viewpoint!
Re:‘Saluton’: the surprise return of Esperanto
by jcranmer on Thursday December 28, 2017 @01:55PM
(#16024007)
It's difficult to incorporate because it would basically be original research that's a metareview of published articles. Of course, the article itself is basically a metareview of primary source articles, which itself is a no-no on Wikipedia, but at least the fact that it is such basically screams that it's biased and non-NPOV.
If you want to claim that Esperanto is easier to learn than, say, English, I would not dispute that. Although I would point out that some of that ease comes from its artificiality--learning about culture is a major component of foreign language courses (particularly in scholastic environments), and Esperanto basically lacks culture.