It seems that if you know a couple of Romance languages, and I know Latin and French, and a small vocabulary from Spanish and Italian and German after doing Duolingo courses, you get the gist of many texts in romance languages.
Spanish flag.
Spanish is one of the easiest languages to learn, according to the number of hours you need to spend, as reported in sources quoted in Wikipedia. I started Spanish.
Italian flag, green, white and red. Tricolour.
Then dropped Spanish in favour of Italian because I was going to Umbria in Italy.
My next trips were to Romania, where the language is a bit like Italian.
Madeira, side track into Portuguese, which does not have the musicality of Italian. And I prefer opera to Fado. And more Italian restaurants are in London and Singapore than Portuguese restaurants so I get less practise.
I tried Russian, difficult. Then Korean. The latter was a total loss of time.
I wanted something easy. Esperanto. I am now half way through the basic course.
Interlingua is my new favourite.
Previously I was learning Esperanto with Duolingo. Esperanto was my first choice because of its history with the Zamenhofs. I visited Zamenhof's grave in Warsaw in Poland. I clambered around in the snow to see it. It is also spoken and learned more widely than interlingua.
Flag of Hungary.
When I read that Esperanto was taught in Hungarian schools I was under the impression that it was an almost mandatory second language. Not so, according to a Hungarian on the Facebook Polyglot page. Apparently it is offered in Hungary because many Hungarians find English and German difficult.
But I find the Esperanto diacritics (dots over letters) hard doing. Although I can cope with French symbols above and below letters, I keep forgetting that the dot over the c in Esperanto is for the sound ch instead of c or s. When I am learning using my mobile phone I often leave the sound off in public places such as trains or when with others who are working or concentrating on tasks. When I switch the sound on again to check the pronunciation, I find I have mis-learned the word as car instead of char. Also I have not yet managed to type the diacritics.
Ido flag.
Ido
Ido was an attempt to improve Esperanto. However, it has not caught on. Purists prefer to stick to the original system started by Zamenhof.
An Interlingua flag.
To me this is too similar to the European flag. I prefer the other version.
Interlingua
Interlingua takes not one but several languages, and picks a word root common to them all for the basis of vocabulary.
Zamenhof's system uses a series of rules. So cold is malvarma, not-hot, a construction immediately obvious to those who have taken the trouble to learn Esperanto. However, Interlingua would take caldo and fredo having the roots such as freezing in other languages as having a recognizable root similarity to a large number of readers, writers and speakers.
Esperanto is marginally easier, for those from countries in Asia and elsewhere which do not have the basis for romance languages. IT is logical and easy to pick up and pronounce, encouraging because you make fewer mistakes and faster progress, which encourages you to go on and learn a real language, with an already familiar vocabulary.
I shall shortly be finishing my Esperanto course and will be pushing the authorities at Duolingo to introduce Interlingua as a follow-on language. It is in my opinion even easier than Esperanto.
Useful Websites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_Esperanto_and_Ido
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_Esperanto_and_Interlingua
duolingo.com
Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.
Spanish flag.
Spanish is one of the easiest languages to learn, according to the number of hours you need to spend, as reported in sources quoted in Wikipedia. I started Spanish.
Italian flag, green, white and red. Tricolour.
Then dropped Spanish in favour of Italian because I was going to Umbria in Italy.
My next trips were to Romania, where the language is a bit like Italian.
Madeira, side track into Portuguese, which does not have the musicality of Italian. And I prefer opera to Fado. And more Italian restaurants are in London and Singapore than Portuguese restaurants so I get less practise.
I tried Russian, difficult. Then Korean. The latter was a total loss of time.
I wanted something easy. Esperanto. I am now half way through the basic course.
Interlingua is my new favourite.
Esperanto flag.
Flag of Hungary.
When I read that Esperanto was taught in Hungarian schools I was under the impression that it was an almost mandatory second language. Not so, according to a Hungarian on the Facebook Polyglot page. Apparently it is offered in Hungary because many Hungarians find English and German difficult.
But I find the Esperanto diacritics (dots over letters) hard doing. Although I can cope with French symbols above and below letters, I keep forgetting that the dot over the c in Esperanto is for the sound ch instead of c or s. When I am learning using my mobile phone I often leave the sound off in public places such as trains or when with others who are working or concentrating on tasks. When I switch the sound on again to check the pronunciation, I find I have mis-learned the word as car instead of char. Also I have not yet managed to type the diacritics.
Ido
Ido was an attempt to improve Esperanto. However, it has not caught on. Purists prefer to stick to the original system started by Zamenhof.
An Interlingua flag.
To me this is too similar to the European flag. I prefer the other version.
Interlingua
Interlingua takes not one but several languages, and picks a word root common to them all for the basis of vocabulary.
Zamenhof's system uses a series of rules. So cold is malvarma, not-hot, a construction immediately obvious to those who have taken the trouble to learn Esperanto. However, Interlingua would take caldo and fredo having the roots such as freezing in other languages as having a recognizable root similarity to a large number of readers, writers and speakers.
Esperanto is marginally easier, for those from countries in Asia and elsewhere which do not have the basis for romance languages. IT is logical and easy to pick up and pronounce, encouraging because you make fewer mistakes and faster progress, which encourages you to go on and learn a real language, with an already familiar vocabulary.
I shall shortly be finishing my Esperanto course and will be pushing the authorities at Duolingo to introduce Interlingua as a follow-on language. It is in my opinion even easier than Esperanto.
Useful Websites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_Esperanto_and_Ido
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_Esperanto_and_Interlingua
duolingo.com
Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.
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