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A comment on Invented languages and their long history of failure.. Parent comment

Re:Invented languages and their long history of failure. by tokenadult on Sunday August 02, 2009 @11:24AM (#737529)
They are claims, but actual learners in real life find that the thing that helps language learning the most is opportunity to have much interaction with other people who know the language. (The single most important way that people around the world learn new languages is through migration and trade.) Empirically, if Esperanto were easy to learn, more people would be learning it. If a lot of Esperanto speakers were really at an A-level degree of proficiency, they would provide Esperanto parallel texts for their English-language posts in favor of Esperanto.
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Re:Invented languages and their long history of failure. by eiriarte on Sunday August 02, 2009 @03:39PM (#737959)
Those are too many unwarranted assertions and plain non-sequiturs in a single paragraph. At this point it seems clear that I won't convince you, no matter what arguments I employ; and that of course you won't convince me with those theoretical unwarranted assertions and obvious non-sequiturs, as I know from experience that Esperanto is clearly easier than English.

So, at this point, it is better that people interested in getting objective information take some basic course and decide for themselves. Fortunately, there are very good basic courses that can be easily completed in 2-3 weeks.

There is a very good downloadable course at:

http://ikurso.net

Also there are plenty of online courses at:

http://lernu.net

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Re:Invented languages and their long history of failure. by tokenadult on Monday August 03, 2009 @02:04PM (#739738)
I made the suggestion above

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=736241

that anyone who claims that Esperanto is easy to learn and easy to understand is welcome to post parallel texts in Esperanto alongside statements in English about how much harder English is to learn than Esperanto. People get a lot of practice in English, because of the abundant opportunities to use English to communicate, but few people make much use of Esperanto, even when arguing in favor of Esperanto.

See also my extensive list of factual questions about Esperanto posted further above,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=734594

which no one has answered in this thread.

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