#LanguageLearning & Mass Transit to Build Empathy via Esperanto

languagelearning, , , ,

   Esperanto is a very simple language to learn, by design.  Given the interest readers have expressed over the years, I thought I might share some of my newest language learning journey here on my blog.  It may be a stretch, but I’d also like to note that some of my most fun and interesting language learning experiences have taken place on mass transit, like the time a whole bus full of people helped me translate a (clean!) lymerick into Turkish!

I decided to learn Esperanto, finally, after years of reading about it, but having more important linguistic priorities, like learning the languages of the countries where I was working so that I could rent an apartment!
So, since Turkish is the language in which I am still needing to work on grammar and reading/writing, while Spanish is the easiest and my most comfortable learned language (I am also fluent in French, but I tend to think more in Spanish), I take most of my notes in those two languages, and in French as I review my notes.  This helps me connect the new learning to my already learned material, and makes things much easier.
IMG_20221104_135723769_BURST000_COVER_TOP
Most language learning starts with the letters and numbers, which I did get to, but I have moved my notes around so much that those pages are lost, so I will start with this, and provide specific notes in posts as requested by interested Readers.
Many videos exist for learning Esperanto, and so I searched in Spanish and in Turkish for video playlists, which got me started with a nice comparison set.  I found it easier to learn the Esperanto alphabet from Turkish, for example, due to some of the similarities, like the letter “c” with a hat on it, pronounced as the same letter with a tail on it, in Turkish.
More soon,
and
        Hopefully, the empathy that studying languages builds, and a little more good example via story, will help all of us learn to be more open to the needs, feelings, and happiness of others.
…
Hoşça kalın!  Saluton!  !Nos Vemos! 

Shira

*****************

Click here to read, if you like:

B5, Hakan:Muhafiz/The Protector, Sihirli Annem, Lupin, or La Casa De Papel/Money Heist Reviews,

Holistic College Algebra & GED/HiSET Night School Lesson Plans,

           or My Nonfiction  & Historical Fiction Serial Writing

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading and sharing, or even writing a guest blog post here, about #ProjectDoBetter.  Phase I aims to build empathy for public goods (libraries, transit, healthcare, and education) via language study and story, among other tools.

Shira Destinie A.  Jones, MPhil

Creative Commons License
Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Advertisement

27 thoughts on “#LanguageLearning & Mass Transit to Build Empathy via Esperanto”

  5. Pingback: #LanguageLearning & Mass Transit to Build Empathy via Esperanto — Inspiring Critical Thinking and Community via Books, Lessons, and Story | Ned Hamson's Second Line View of the News

    1. Ah, yes, Craig/Channon (RiP) and his famous travelling lymerics! I got quite the shock when he insisted that I come up with one in Turkish, so I asked for help! 🙂

      Esperanto has never been the most widely spoken language in any sense (I recall my first questions to friends about learning it, some years back, and being informed that there were more Klingon speakers than Esperanto speakers!), but it is a large enough international community to keep the idea viable, if governments wanted to use it as a common second language. It could very quickly displace English and French, as it is simple to learn, once the decision were made… (which is of course a big reason that both Anglophones and Francophones do not want to discuss the idea!)

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

        1. Yes, I’ve also read that, and it is very heavily Latin based, to make it easier to learn. Zamenhof was surrounded by Europeans in a time when Europe was at the height of its world dominance, and French was the main diplomatic language.

          Nevertheless, Esperanto is a far better tool than English or French, for international use, and it is the US that dominates the world culturally, so any international language must be both easy to learn, and appealing to Eurocentric learners, at least to start with, unfortunately. Anything else would be a complete non-starter, practically.

          (As a Turkish speaker and Hebrew reader, I can agree that Latin based-languages are unfortunate, as the Indo-European language tree lacks the roots concept that semitic languages like Hebrew build words, and the aggregative concept that the Turkic languages use to build logical sentences, both of which also have much more flexibility and precision, but Esperanto has adapted both of these, and uses it to be flexible and logical, while taking most of the vocabulary from Latin-based languages, which are simple and already familiar to most of the world’s language learners.)

          Liked by 4 people

          Reply

            4. Ah, you’ve heard this, too?! Coolness!!

              Yes, I was told by a Lakota woman a few years ago that this is a Lakota saying, so then, I wonder if Gene Roddenberry knew that, or if it was just coincidence that he used that same phrase?

              (I imagine that Majelle Barette, his widow, has been asked this question at some point, so it is likely floating about somewhere online…)

              Liked by 3 people

            5. I am sure he knew! It was made widely known through a movie called “liveliners” or something like that, with Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts and another wellknown actor whose name I just can’t remember. But it wasn’t Hanta yo, it was Hokha hey. Hanta yo is a book title, getting mixed up 😉

              Liked by 2 people

            7. They were three science students and found a way to actually kill themselves for a short while and then come back with a kind of machine. In those death moments they would have experiences of different kinds (I don’t want to spoil it for you in case you want to watch it). And what they didn’t count with was that things came back with them … 😉 I say no more. And one of the guys said “Hokha hey, today is a good day to die”, before he got clinically killed. It was quite a special movie I thought.

              Liked by 1 person

        2. Which reminds me that Esperanto was being invented/proposed, or becoming popular, around the same time that Ataturk chose to create the modern Turkish alphabet (1923-ish), as he was founding the Turkish Republic, and deliberately working to bring what was left of the old Ottoman empire closer to Europe, in culture, and in other ways.

          Liked by 2 people

          Reply
  8. Pingback: #LanguageLearning, Empathy, & #EsperantoFacil | Inspiring Critical Thinking and Community via Books, Lessons, and Story

Please Share your Thoughts

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s