Learn an artifical language in order to learn more languages
I was trawling Google a few weeks ago looking for resources for learning Portuguese, when I stumbled upon an interesting post about Esperanto and how learning Esperanto can help you with learning other languages http://blog.outerthoughts.com/2007/01/speed-learn-a-language-through-esperanto/. It got me intrigued on the subject. I’ve since looked through several sites and wikipedia on the subject of learning an artificial language and how learning such a language as your first language can be a springboard to learning other languages.
Designed for ease
These artificial languages (and I say these because Esperanto is not the only one, it’s got some rivals!) are designed specifically to be easy to learn, they have rules like other languages but unlike natural languages which are riddled with irregularities, languages such as Esperanto, Ido and InterLingua have little or no irregularities. It is claimed that Esperanto is learned four times quicker than even a relatively easy language like Spanish.
Is Esperanto similar to Portuguese?
One interesting thing as a student of Portuguese that I spotted when when I opened Google in Esperanto http://www.google.com/intl/eo/ is that on my Google Toolbar at least, Google thinks Esperanto is Portuguese, not quite sure why, maybe it’s because I’m located in Portugal and Google is guessing when it can’t figure out the language, although I can see Latin influence in Esperanto, I can’t say it looks especially like Portuguese.
Esperanto has many influences
Right now I’m primarily interested in learning Portuguese, but I’m also interested in the possibility of learning similar Latin languages such as Spanish and Italian. While Esperanto does have a lot of influences from the romance languages, it also has a lot of influence from English, German and the Slavic languages so I wondered was there some language more tailor made for getting to grips with the romance languages.
In my next post I describe just such a language http://www.barryocallaghan.com/interlingua-the-artifcial-romance-language/.
