Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers

Re:Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers by RiderOfGiraffes on Friday November 27, 2009 @08:24AM (#963852)

I am by no means proficient in anything other than my first language, but I found other languages much easier to start on once I'd learned lojban. it "untaught" lots of things that I took for granted, and gave me some new structures and ideas that served me in good stead.

It is said that your first acquired language takes four years, subsequent ones take two each. Lojban takes about six months. Perhaps if you want to learn a language, learn lojban first.

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Re:Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers by klipt on Friday November 27, 2009 @08:57AM (#963882)

They've actually done studies on that - not with lojban, but with another simple constructed language: Esperanto. They found that students studying Esperanto for a year followed by French for 3 years fared better than students studying French for 4 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Language_acquisition

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Re:Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers by tokenadult on Friday November 27, 2009 @12:20PM (#964115)

Any such claim about Esperanto should be regarded as a claim that needs further verification.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

Anyway, it is very doubtful that such a claim, even if true for speakers of English learning French in England, would be true for speakers of Chinese learning Japanese in China (or the other way around) or for any number of other likely pairs of native and acquired languages.

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Re:Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers by klipt on Friday November 27, 2009 @06:22PM (#964515)

I only mention the Esperanto studies because (1) they seem to confirm RiderOfGiraffes' intuition (2) AFAIK Esperanto is the only auxlang for which such studies have been done.

I suspect similar effects could be found with lojban, and would love to see more research in that area. However AFAIK no such research currently exists.

I read the ranto ages ago and while it makes many good points, none of them are particularly relevant to the suggestion that the studies were faked. In fact imperfections like sexism could be advantageous if the student then proceeds to a similarly sexist European language (i.e. most of them).

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