Repost: Why not choose an easy language as a first foreign language ?

Why Not Choose an Easy Language as a First Foreign

Language?

By Nicole Else

I do think that learning any foreign language has many benefits and therefore

should be encouraged. It even helps English literacy as students who know a

foreign language can often analyse English much better than other students.

Learning foreign languages certainly opens the mind, helps to understand other

cultures, etc. Lots of different languages are spoken in the world, so which ones

should we teach? I don’t think we should teach only the languages most widely

spoken.

There is one language well worth considering, but many people seem to know

very little about it, even though there are millions of pages in or about it on the

Internet. It is called Esperanto. It has been created 120 years ago and is now

used by up to 2 million people from over 100 different countries. It has proven

itself as a very good means of communication, it is much easier to learn than

national languages, but nevertheless enables to express anything as well as other

languages.

It seems to me that Esperanto would be an ideal first foreign language to teach.

Many people put learning a foreign language in the too hard basket and you can't

really blame them when it comes to have to learn all the irregularities of the

French language, Japanese script, etc.

It is extremely time consuming to learn a foreign language if one wants to

become fluent. Esperanto can be learnt much faster and therefore it boosts

enormously the children's self-esteem. Furthermore it helps a lot with the

learning of subsequent languages. Often it instills a love of languages and we

notice that many Esperanto speakers do go on learning lots of other languages.

In music, children don't start by tackling difficult instruments, in languages it

should be the same, start with an easy language and then go on to more difficult

ones. Furthermore thanks to Esperanto children can send messages to other

people in lots of different countries and therefore get to know many cultures and

not just one like it would be the case if they choose to learn Japanese, for

example.

Schools have a limited amount of time, so expecting them to spend enough time

to make students fluent in national languages is unrealistic. Primary schools could

teach Esperanto and then high schools could offer a variety of languages.

Has Esperanto already been taught in Australian schools? Yes, a few years ago

Monash University made a study about Esperanto after it had been taught at a

Melbourne school. You can read the report at

http://www.springboard2languages.org/documents/ekparoli_report.htm

A Montessori school near Perth is currently teaching Esperanto with great

success. A group of children from that school even went on an exchange trip to

Switzerland, to a little school where Esperanto is taught and had therefore the

opportunity of using Esperanto with non-English speakers. Here

http://www.hacksthps.sa.edu.au/

(then click on Esperanto on the left side) you

can find comments by children who learn Esperanto at a school in South

Australia.

To see what Esperanto looks like, you could check the free online course Vojagu

kun Zam (complete with sound) at

www.lernu.net

Furthermore it seems to me that teaching Esperanto would promote a fairer

world, in which all cultures and languages are respected and equal. At the

moment, for example, the American culture is being studied much more

frequently than other equally worthwhile cultures.

From: www.languageseducation.com/else070621.pdf