Word of the Day - Vorto de la tago

A very useful aid for learning a foreign language is to practice it "little and often". For this purpose I make use of two facilities that make it easier to acquire new words on a daily basis.

Vorto de la tago sends you an email every morning with a word. This email includes not only a definition (in Esperanto) but also, and this is very important, a couple of sentences in which that word is used. For example, today's word was klacxi. It means to chat or gossip. On of the example sentences gives you the right preposition: Mi aŭdis klaĉojn pri vi. Very useful!

The other service is on Twitter. There's a 'user' learnesperanto, under whose name a handful of words with their English glosses are tweeted. Not as useful, due to lack of context. See the previous post! But still helpful.

This is just brilliant: the Web makes these things so easy (and cheap). No need to send letters by surface mail, wait for ages until a reply comes, or pay subscriptions to newsletters or similar things.

La ttt estas mirinda!

Typical problems with dictionaries...

I can now comfortably compose simple sentences, those which just have a subject/verb/object, and even some prepositions. My (active) vocabulary is still fairly small, and that is one aspect I will have to work on over the next days (and weeks!). But what I really want to do is write more complex sentences.

One reason to use more complex grammatical structures is that you can avoid a lot of repetition. Instead of writing "I went to the theatre. I saw a play" you write "I went to the theatre and saw a play" - the "I" of the second clause has been dropped. This seems to be even more relevant in Esperanto (as compared to English) as there are fewer synonyms. In English you can easily choose a different word to avoid repeating yourself, but in Esperanto this is not that easy, and for good reason: the vast vocabulary is one of the aspects of English which make it hard to acquire full competence in it.

At present I play around a bit, and I have encountered some relative clauses which I can now use with some confidence at least. I have also found a grammar on-line, so I tried my first passive verb today. Slowly I make progress...

My lack of vocabulary re-raised my awareness of the deficiency of bi-lingual dictionaries: words usually have more than one meaning, and out of context it is not possible to decide which word exactly is the best translation. For example, I wanted to say about a play I saw recently (which was adapted from a book) that there was too much plot for the stage. So I looked at 'plot' in my on-line Esperanto-English dictionary, and found the following entries:

• intrigo - plot
• komploto - conspiracy, plot
• rakontintrigo - plot

Neither of these seems to refer to the plot of a story, apart from perhaps the last one. Intrigo sounds too much like intrigue, so I decided it was probably wrong. But this is with my bias of being a speaker of German and English. In the end I settled for rakonto, which is glossed as "narrative, story, tale". I had a similar problem with "stage" which has a number of possible translations, mostly involving the kind of stage you're at in your life or something.

The best (if not only) way to acquire vocabulary properly is by use, in this case mainly reading. By seeing words in the context in which they are used you get a feeling for how to use them yourself, which is why immersion is always the best way to really learn a language. But I am not yet in a position to do much reading as I'm lacking the grammatical knowledge, and also the more complex morphology - suffixes modifying the meaning of a word.

But this is really the thing I need to aim for: expand the vocabulary, and then get reading.

Halfway?

I am now halfway through the 10 lesson correspondence course, and I feel much more secure. Due to the speed I've been going through it (especially at the weekend) I need to go over the vocabulary again. Just about manage to get most of the pronouns right by now–practice makes more or less perfect.

The correlatives (45 combinations of 5 pre- and 9 suffixes) are very useful, but require some effort to be mastered. Part of the problem is probably that they don't map straightforwardly onto anything similar in English.

While searching our library catalogue for Esperanto-related material I came across a book by someone familar, Chris Gledhill, whom I know from his time at Aston. He wrote a corpus-based description of Esperanto, including a detailed linguistic account of the language itself. Interesting!

I can now write longer sentences without making too many mistakes, but complex structures still elude me.

Mi estas kapabla skribi pli longajn malerarajn frazojn, sed kompleksaj strukturoj estas tro malfacila nun ankoraux.

That sentence is probably full of mistakes, but at least it's a bit more complex than just La suno brilas hodiaux!

Starting off

Learning by yourself, especially a language, is quite hard. To begin with, you need to find the motivation/energy/time. Earlier this (academic) year I tried to teach myself Latin, or rather, refresh my school Latin from decades ago. I did manage to get some way into it, but it is not very satisfying when doing exercises that you need to self-correct. Often I had the impression I had come up with a valid paraphrase (but I wasn't sure), and I could also not tell what that sentence I erroneously wrote actually meant (if it meant anything at all!). But as soon as you involve a teacher you are restricted with time (as you need yet another regular slot in your busy schedule) and it also costs money (which you might not want to spend if it's just a for-fun-activity).

With Esperanto there is a correspondence course which works by email. You do exercises, send them by email to a tutor that has been assigned to you, and you get it back with comments. Brilliant. You also have a contact person now, and in my emails accompanying the exercises I can try out writing stuff in Esperanto. Pretty broken Esperanto, but at least it gives you a chance to practice.

In order to sign up, go to the site pacujo.net and follow the link. The pages look a bit old-fashioned, and I first wondered it it was still working, but shortly afterwards a got an email from a nice man living in Canada who told me I had not made any mistakes with my translations. How encouraging! I'm now looking forward to working my way through the ten lessons, and hopefully by the end I will be some way towards my goal. I'll keep you posted...

Learning Esperanto

I'm currently teaching a final year module called "Language in the Information Society", where I cover aspects of modern society from a linguistic point of view, eg encryption, information retrieval, machine translation, knowledge representation, and last week, artificial/planned languages.

Years ago I tried learning Esperanto, but then gave up (can't remember why). Part of the problem I guess is the lack of a direct need if there's nobody around to talk to. Though apparently the Internet has been a very positive force with regard to giving Esperanto a vital boost: communication never was easier than in these days of email and skype.

My main interest in the past was in the linguistic features–as a computational linguist by trade I was fascinated by the supposed regularities of the language; building a morphological analyser should really be a piece of cake. But then I never had the time to do so. Now the seminar of planned languages re-kindled my interest, and I have decided to start again. In this blog I will try to keep track of my progress, and hopefully inspire other people to give it a try as well.