Deborah Fallows, linguist and author of Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love and Language, discusses the recent history and unique features of the Chinese language.
Click  on the podcast button to listen.

This is an interesting story in a lot of respects, but one angle that appealed to me is the idea that the dichotomies of ancient vs new, and natural vs designed, are not nearly as clear-cut as they might seem.

Deborah Fallows explains that not only is Mandarin "new" to the majority of Chinese people, whose families never knew it until a century ago, but that much of Mandarin itself, including simplified Chinese and pinyin, is deliberately designed and considerably younger than even that.
The power of the Chinese government to make changes and insist on their adoption is probably unrivalled in the modern world. Will it extend even beyond China's boundaries?

If you fancy an Esperanto to Mandarin adventure of your own, you might like to consider starting at the Chinese Island of Hai Nan Dao (sometimes written Hainan Dao), which means "South Sea Island". The island is about half the size of Tasmania and was traditionally used as a place to exile people. Now they've noticed that it is a lovely place to be in the Chinese winter- being on the same latitude as the Phillipines, and are promoting its use for tourism.

Every January-February, the Baza Esperanto Kursaro is held at the University of Hainan and turns raw beginners into capable speakers in that time. In 2012, this will be joined by a new "Esperanto University" in which professors from around the world, including China of course,  will deliver short courses in their own specialties, in Esperanto.
It all makes for a dramatically different summer holiday and very affordable- the entire month of food, accommodation and instruction costs only $600 per participant- it'll cost you that much to stay home :-)
Click the picture to visit the website.

Anatoly Karlin writes a great little piece on his early experience with Esperanto.
He's obviously done his homework because he gets quite a bit of the big picture too.
His story starts:
" In the course of myChinese adventures, all other languages started to seem a lot easier. So needless to say that Esperanto, one of the easiest of them all, looks like just a walk in the park now. In particular, I’m interested in what the glossophiles here think about it, i.e. yalensis and Lazy Glossophiliac. Here are my rambling thoughts on it:

* It is easy. VERY easy. I have been studying it for three days, and I can already say many phrases: e.g. the one in the title (“Esperanto is the easiest language in the world”). Its vocabulary is about 60% Latinic, 30% Anglic-Germanic and 10% Slavic; its grammar is simplified Latinic; its morphology and semantics are largely Slavonic. Being a natural language, everything is very logical, it is entirely phonetic and there are no exceptions. Root words can be easily transformed from verbs (add in “i) to adjectives (add an “e), an adjective (add an “a), a place where it is done (add “ej”), a professional who does it (add “ist”), a female version (add “ino”), a diminished version (add “et”), a magnified version (add “eg”), etc. For people with some familiarity with European languages, the vocabulary is a piece of cake. It will be a lot tougher for Asians, but nonetheless even for them it will still be an order of magnitude easier than starting from a natural language.

* Despite its easiness, I’m discovering Esperanto is very flexible. In a sense, even more so than languages like English or Chinese, which are largely bound by the Subject-Verb-Object structure. Though I may change my mind as I get more advanced, so far it seems to me to be as flexible as Russian, which is amazing considering its grammar is orders of magnitude simpler. Quite frankly, of the languages I’ve looked at it in any detail, it is my favorite by far (the full rankings: Esperanto; Spanish; Russian; Latin; Chinese; English; French; German).

* Why learn it? First, there are studies showing that students who spent a year learning Esperanto were able to assimilate French and other languages quicker thereafter, eventually overtaking the control groups that didn’t study Esperanto. Only about one year max is needed for Esperanto fluency. But there are accounts of some people accomplishing it in days. There are monthly meetings of Esperantists in the Bay Area. I’m planning to attend the next one, and I already feel I won’t be embarrassed to open my mouth. By then I will probably be far better at it than at Chinese, which I’m studying for the fourth month now; a depressing thought, that.

This brings us to the second reason why Esperanto is awesome .........(You can read the rest  here.)

The week has been pretty much blogless because I've been out and about for conferences.
I spoke at the ACEL conference in Adelaide on Wednesday and

the Free Linguistics Conference in Sydney on Sunday.
Both talks were about how Apprenticeship Language Learning using Esperanto is a useful strategy for sustainable change, in giving children a first fluent foreign language, a broad and changeable intercultural perspective and the skills and motivation for other language success. The presentation at the Free Linguistics conference went on to give an insight into two of the first schools to have adopted the strategy using the "Talking to the Whole Wide World" resource, since it was published in April 2010. These are Sutherland Montessori in Sydney and Jakarta Montessori School. They are both using the resource as it was designed to be used- to teach the teachers and students together- and both are making good progress. They intend to start using their Esperanto to communicate with each other in early 2012, and perhaps with other schools, in other countries, later in the year.
One question from the ACEL group was about the distribution of Esperanto around the world- where is it most used?

I had already shown this map of countries with enough speakers to warrant a national Esperanto association (coloured green). As he supposed, the density of Esperanto speakers in the green countries varies. We see more Esperanto speakers in South Korea, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil , Vietnam and  French-speaking African countries, places where there is more than one good contender for the role of second language.
Although Australia is certainly not yet among the countries most eagerly embracing Esperanto ( we don't yet eagerly embrace any other languages), we are in this same position where there is no really compelling case for any particular language to be the one for all of us, so we may join the hotspots list when we realize that bilingualism is both valuable and affordable!
If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer comments :-)

According to ACARA, responsible for developing Australia's national curriculum: The most direct means for learning about and engaging with Indigenous communities and Asian countries and people is to learn their languages.

This constitutes fuzzy thinking because it confuses an effect at National level with an effect at the level of each individual child for whom we are responsible.

How are our students realistically going to learn “their languages”? We almost  never succeed in teaching students even one foreign language well enough to exchange genuine cultural insights.

Although it is traditional to act as if 100 students having insight into 1 foreign culture each, is the same thing as 100 students knowing something about 100 (or even 10) foreign cultures, it isn’t: Understanding Japan is not understanding Asia. Asian cultures have a vast diversity of languages, religions, economic and political systems, artforms and other priorities. Even if our current system worked perfectly, which of course it doesn’t, we would still be educating bicultural graduates, not multicultural ones and that is a bar too low for the education of global citizens.

Indigenous and Asian cultures are diverse and important, and the plurals are important. Putting plurals on the goals and then delivering singles at implementation does nothing to increase the trust with which Australians view academic advice.

To achieve the cross-curiculum priorities for individual Australians we need pathways such as ALL to keep our delivery general at the F-6 stage, so that children really do get to combine consistent cumulative language learning with a broad and shifting intercultural perspective, responsive to student interests.

This slideshow  introduces some of the classes of primary children who are currently learning Esperanto and are available to bring some personal significance to parts of the globe that would otherwise be beyond reach.

Some fundamental linguistic concepts and skills which can be  taught using Esperanto as an apprenticeship language include:

• the existence of different sounds, alphabets and character systems,
• the concept of root words and related languages,
• differences in syntax and grammar, gender and register,
• lack of one-to-one correspondence in translation,
• literal and liberal translation,
• memory techniques,
• paraphrasing to cover missing vocabulary,
• cultural concepts embedded in language,
• use of a bilingual dictionary and
• avoidance of idioms.

Can you think of more?

Any language can be used to teach these transferable concepts but, where time is limited, languages with a similar alphabet to English, phonetic spelling and more regular grammar will get further through the list than those without these features.

Literacy skills, problem solving skills and thinking skills are developed in learning any language.
However, students learning Esperanto spend more time practicing higher order thinking skills, such as application of understandings to creative tasks, synthesis and analysis of texts and evaluation processes.

This is because less time is needed for recognition and recall in Esperanto, because it lacks the idiosyncratic variations in spelling, grammar and pronunciation found in most national languages.

Wisdom has been defined as perceptiveness to patterns. Pattern use in Esperanto is extensive and consistent, which makes pattern recognition intrinsically rewarding and a source of competence. The effect of several years of such encouragement at an impressionable time invites further investigation.

Of course, the intrinsic motivation for language learning is language use, so we'll look at the third reason for welcoming Esperanto into your school - who your students will have to talk to,  next time.

Edward de Bono explained the difference between intelligence and thinking skill as being like the horsepower of a car and the skill of the driver, if both didn't count for something, there would be no famous racing car drivers - or races!
Yesterday's post showed what early Esperanto can offer your students in terms of an engine upgrade, today is all about transferrable skills.
Experts in Languages Education have long been aware of something called the propaedeutic effect - the fact that bilingual people master a new language quicker than monolingual people do.
A good summary of many of the studies reaching this conclusion can be found here.
A more charismatic testimony to the same effect is offered by Benny the Irish Polyglot here.
Why would you care about transferable skills?
1. Why not? If you are doing Esperanto anyway in order to equip your students with increased concentration capacity before they are too old to gain maximum benefit, transferable skills are icing on the cake.
2. You can't possibly know which languages are going to matter to which children in the course of their lives, so equipping them with linguistic flexibility is the best service you can provide.
3. Transferable skills provide protection against the continuity problems endemic in the present school system, due to inadequate supply of LOTE specialists and limited demand for LOTE in the post-compulsory phase. In the present system, few children achieve significant mastery of another language because the target language changes with teacher availability. Even the few children lucky enough to experience transition to a secondary LOTE program matching their relatively successful primary target language, experience a frustrating hiatus while incoming students without that experience are inducted into the language. Better to master one multicultural language in primary school and start fresh and confident in a new one in secondary.
So what skills are transferrable, exactly? Are they anything to do with De Bono's conception of  "Thinking Skills".
Stay tuned for tomorrow's blog :-)

“New research into the neurobiology of bilingualism has found that being fluent in two languages, particularly from early childhood, not only enhances a person’s ability to concentrate, but might also protect against the onset of dementia and other age-related cognitive decline.
Scientists have discovered that bilingual adults have denser gray matter (brain tissue packed with information-processing nerve cells and fibers), especially in the brain’s left hemisphere, where most language and communication skills are controlled. The effect is strongest in people who learned a second language before the age of five and in those who are most proficient at their second language. This finding suggests that being bilingual from an early age significantly alters the brain’s structure.” (Society for Neuroscience, 2008)
That's a long quote but it does say quite compactly what other sources confirm - that  learning another language, early and well, improves brain structure and function permanently, in a way that learning other things may not. Surely enhancing the ability to concentrate is something which will have benefits in every area of learning. Rather than being a distraction from "Key Competencies", "Basics" or "Core Subjects", early bilingualism can be seen as "sharpening the axe" before spending the day chopping down a really big tree!

Of course, it doesn't help to be vague about the practicalites of providing early bilingualism.
This chart shows what can be achieved in the first 100 hours of  education, using different target languages.*
As you can see, the benefits of bilingualism - improved concentration and resistance to dementia in later life - are fully realized by schools offering 100 hours of Esperanto, but not by the other choices.
After the first hundred hours, the choice is wide open again - more so than it was, but that's tomorrow's post!

*The figures are derived from a number of sources including Alex McAndrew, former director of Sydney University's language learning unit, and the US department of defense. They are for motivated adults, and children take a little longer (wonder why? ask me in the comments below!)

Esperanto is a language, but not a language cobbled together by a bunch of cavemen and their numerous and disparate descendants, like most.

Esperanto was diligently designed by a multilingual professional with a clear purpose in mind: To distill a language which would retain all communicative functions found in other languages, with a minimum of idiosyncratic complications.

Why? Because a lot of what makes us human is that we can communicate with each other, and so inability to communicate with most humans is an obstacle to full recognition of their their humanity.

Obviously it isn’t the only obstacle but it is a significant one, and soluble.So Zamenhof dedicated his life to solving it successfully.

The language has been learned and used by millions of people for over a century, and has adapted as well as English to the advent of the computer age, so it would be fair to say that it has passed the test of time.

Today, we have even more reason to appreciate that high quality human life on this planet in the next few generations is going to require global citizenship.

Natives clearing forest in Brazil matter to us, multinational corporations doing similar things worldwide matter to us too, to all of us.

Most people in the World do not speak English, and will not speak English in their lifetimes. They do not have the time, or the money, or the access to teachers to make it happen.

So, we can leave them out... or meet them halfway. How would you like to be treated if the shoe were on the other foot?

Just as a handshake involves both parties stepping forward and extending a hand, so learning Esperanto takes both parties (adults) about 10 hours of instruction and 100-200 hours of practice.

Esperanto, as a “linguistic handshake”, is more affordable to both parties than the 600-2200 hours that natural languages require to reach the same fluency.

Besides being a beautiful example of decent behaviour, win-win “green hat” thinking and all sorts of other wholesome attitudes and values that you would want your students to absorb, Esperanto offers them a wide variety of immediate and lasting advantages. But that's tomorrow's post :-)

EsperantoAustralia is a yahoo group with 100 or so members, used to talk in (or about) anything to do with Esperanto.
Alan Mendelawitz has been keeping us supplied with nearly daily doses of Esperanto humour, with translations, for maybe 5 years now. His jokes help beginners build fluency and keep the rest of us in touch. Sometimes they are more hilarious than other times, but that just makes you appreciate the good ones more :-) Thanks, Alan!
If you'd like to join the group (and are not a grumpy troll), send a message to EsperantoAustrala@yahoogroups.com and say hi!, (or saluton!)

Enjoy a whole bunch of free reads!
Bretaro has Esperanto translations of Grimm brothers fairy tales and grown-up stuff like "Murder on the Orient Express", all nicely presented and downloadable for nothing.
Judging by the empty headings, there are plans to expand, to carry films and soundfiles but... well- enjoy the print for now :-)