A Presentation About Esperanto
The Esperanto Association of Britain runs a programme called Springboard which offers teaching to primary schools using Esperanto as a faciliating device to create language-awareness.
Along similar lines, the Springboard staff asked me to give a presentation to a primary school in Leicestershire in recognition of the European Day Of Languages last September. It went pretty well. Here is the report that I provided to them.
Given to Leyslands High School, Countesthorpe, Leicestershire—September 26th 2007
The scenario given to me was a little different to others, since I was afforded 90 minutes, and an audience of 200 year-7 pupils.
My intention was not to present a 90-minute overview of Esperanto, since it would be hard not to make it a long lesson, and cause the children to think about it as a boring chore to have survived. Instead, I decided to introduce them to language itself, at times interspersing with Esperanto. I wanted to take them on an adventure, opening their eyes to a new appreciation of language and—hopefully—causing a seed of interest to germinate in them. It was my hope that they would leave the presentation being aware that languages change over time (including their own), and that though certain languages might be labelled “foreign”, one can think of them more as a sibling that grew up overseas but still contains some of the family traits.
I set up my PowerPoint display, and was warmly introduced to the children by the very affable head of department.
I greeted the audience with the comment, “Dankon pro via afabla enkonduko. Ĉu vi kiuj sidas malantaŭ bone aŭdas min?” Of course, there was no acknowledgment. I pointed out to the pupils that there was an obvious problem with me being a person with whom they’d have liked to communicate, but there being a barrier in front of us because of language. I said that this could be true in the future, that there are lots of people that we might like to speak to, but that language gets in the way.
We discussed solutions to this. Thankfully, not one of them offered, “They should all speak English” as a possibility. The children reached the conclusion themselves that one has to learn other languages if one is to open lines of communication with others.
I asked them which language they though I’d been speaking. This was quite an amusing moment for me actually; unlike adults, they weren’t cagey about getting it wrong, as was shown to me by the swarm of raised hands.
“French!”
“Non, ce n’était pas en français.”
“Spanish?”
“No. Lo que he decho no fue español. Not bad though.”
“Italian!”
“Non parlavo in italiano, no. It sounds a lot like it though.”
“German!”
“Nein. Ich kenne kein Deutsch. But it does have some German words in it. OK, one more …”
“Swedish?” (This was a brilliant guess, because I actually use Swedish as an example language in the presentation, and was able to respond to this one too in the language itself!)
“Nej. Jag tala inte svenska.”
And then one child started pumping the air with his finger. I asked him, and he knew: “Esperanto”. (The teacher besides him had given him the answer.) This was superb, as it allowed me to speak about this mysterious language. I felt comfortable doing this, because the previous part had demonstrated to people that I’m a lover of languages anyway. Had I not established that, I would have felt a little wary of speaking about this artificial language. When I decided to learn Esperanto, it was at a book signing by Georges Kersaudy, a Frenchman who speaks over 50 languages. I asked him which was “best”; he replied “Esperanto”. Seeing as he was a man with credentials rather than somebody who spoke only Esperanto, I took him at his word. I hoped to give a similar impression to my audience.
The talk about Esperanto that I gave was just the sort that one would expect. I described young Ludwik living in a city divided by language, and what he did about it. I then informed them that we would see a bit of Esperanto later, but I wanted to look at other languages first.
So far, so good. The children had shown an eagerness to participate, and that’s exactly what I wanted them to do next.
On the screen, I had drawn a map of the world. At each click, the words “How many languages exist in the world?” in various languages appeared. I used this for a bit of language awareness. The links between the latin languages and Esperanto were obvious. I drew their attention to something else; in three of the languages, the plurals were marked by –s; the other three (Italian, German, and Esperanto) did it differently. This was a gentle way of opening their minds to how other languages might differ. We looked at the German word “Sprachen”. I told them that German often adds –en to words to create a plural.
“Would it be possible to do that in English, children?”
“Not really. You could say “computeren” in English, but it would sound weird.”
“So you can’t think of any examples, childs?”
There was a tangible reality hitting some of the children at that point as some hands shot up. “Children! That’s an example!”
I congratulated them on that and said that I could also think of “oxen” and “an old word for brothers: brethren”. I led them to the conclusion that maybe English and German aren’t as dissimilar as the children might have thought after all.
I then asked them to answer the question of how many languages exist in the world, by raising their hand when I give out number intervals. Most seemed to think that there are between 50 and 100, and 100 and 500. A cautious few thought that 500 to 1000 was a possibility. Nobody thought that over 1000 was valid, including the teachers.
A click on the laptop brought forth the figure “680”. The children were largely astounded at that figure. I asked them to name as many as they could. The first answer amused me: “American.”
I then dramatised something, acting as though something had gone wrong. I went back to the laptop, and pressed a button. The number 9 appeared out of nowhere, and affixed itself to the 680, making it 6809.
“That was clumsy of me. There are actually 6809 languages in the world.”
It had the desired effect, as even the teachers looked at the figure in disbelief. This proved useful, as it allowed me to reinforce the line that, “One can’t possibly learn everybody else’s languages. There has to be a different solution.” Subtle, that.
Next stop: Europe. They were surprised to hear that there are 255 indigenous languages in Europe. I added that were we to factor in languages spoken in Europe as a result of immigration and refuge-seeking, there are actually 350 … in London alone.
I was conscious of wowing them with numbers, so made sure to use lots of graphics, including a pie chart that indicated that 56% or Europeans can speak a foreign tongue, 28% speak two, and English is the most common learnt language, spoken by 38% of Europeans.
Up next were samples of different languages; Italian, German, French, and Swedish. I made sure to read them out so that the pupils could hear the sounds. I actually cheated a little; my Italian mentioned spaghetti and pizza, my French included “baguette”, and my Swedish “Vikingar”. I made sure that the German words were like their English equivalent; Wasser, Tee, Kaffee. This was because a recurring theme of my presentation was that languages are not impossible to understand, and some are actually related.
There was a fifth language that I included; it was “The Lord’s Prayer” in Old English. My point was hit home; they could actually understand the German, French, Italian, and Swedish better than they could their own language from a thousand years ago! It also reinforced my point of languages actually starting off together; if English could be so different 1000 years ago, why couldn’t it be the case that other languages used to look like English too?
I then took them on a little tour of English through the ages, working backwards. I gave them quotations from the 19th century (“My house is painting” as being the only acceptable form of “My house is being painted”, a form fiercely protected by the purists of the day), the King James bible (“Father forgive them, for they know not what they do”), Shakespeare (“Where goest thou?”), Chaucer, and then something from the year 1000. At each stage, I asked the children what we would say in modern English. They were surprised to find out that their everyday English was born in stages, and that the auxiliary “do” used not to exist, there was no continous tense, and so on.
Next on screen was the heading “European Languages Are Related”, under which was a table with English, Swedish, and German words. There was a nice feeling when I felt as though the children had finally accepted that the languages were indeed related. I’d told them that on occasions, but now they were able to see it.
At this point, we were about 40 minutes into the presentation. I felt that it was appropriate to give them an activity, and there was already a Springboard one that ties in with this.
They each received a “Language Cousins” poster. Again, this was making it clear to them that there are things common to other languages. I had just demonstrated it with English, Swedish, and German; now they could see it with other European languages.
At this point, I mentioned Esperanto again, and explained that “Ludwik knew several languages. When he was coming up with words for his own language, he checked whether there were any common forms that a number of people from different groups might recognise. Now you have to pretend that you’re Ludwik. There are no right or wrong answers. The only rule I have is that it has to finish with –o, because all Esperanto words for objects and things do.” (As they hadn’t seen the Esperanto alphabet, I didn’t mention phoneticity.)
They were given 20 minutes for this, and eagerly took to their task. A number came up to me mere minutes into the exercise and showed me what they’d got. There was a charming innocence about them actually; there were a few groups that called a wolf “lubo”, because they didn’t want the only language that used “b” in place of “p” to feel left out. Others did similar things with other animals.
Recap:
So far we had:
- seen that there are thousands of languages in the world
- discussed solutions to the problem of language barriers
- seen that even their own language had changed beyond recognition over the last thousand years
- realised that English is actually a sister to Swedish and German, and, by extension, othes
- witnessed that there are common factors within the other languages too
Part Two: The Case For Esperanto
We had mentioned Esperanto at several stages. The children had now undertaken an Esperanto activity. I made it clear to them (well, more for the teachers’ benefit) that I love language and speak a number of them, and that I wasn’t out to try to discourage them, hence my making it clear that there are common factors. “Nonetheless, there are problems associated with learning languages. What I’m going to do is draw attention to those problems, and show how Esperanto gets around it. I’ll be using English as a reference. That’s not to try to undermine English; it’s more so that you think ‘Oh yeah, that would make learning English a little more awkward’ and then transpose those thoughts to other languages. It is a fact that one’s first foreign language is the hardest to learn, so I want to propose that you learn Esperanto first. Tests show that learning Esperanto makes it easier to do well at following languages. This will grant you an understanding of all the terms that you’ll have to learn with other languages. However, you’ll do so without having to concentrate on irregularities. You’ll also benefit from not having your confidence knocked when something difficult comes up.”
Point 1:
Many independent tests over the last century have been administered by professors. They all show the same result: Esperanto helps. A typical test involves splitting you into two groups. You (points to one side of the room) will learn French for four years, whilst you (points to other half) will learn Esperanto for one year and French for three. After you take tests at the end of the fourth year, you (points to the Esperanto side) will each have scored higher marks in French than you (points to other half).
Point 2:
Natural languages have elements that make learning hard.
For example:
Gender:
English is the only language that I know that doesn’t assign gender to nouns. For example, all the Latin languages split their words into masculine and feminine. German has a neuter category too. The Scandinavian languages have “common” and “neuter”.
Often, this is completely arbitrary, so hard to learn and memorise.
For instance, the word for “girl” in German isn’t feminine! And how are you supposed to guess whether the French consider a table to be a boy or girl?!
Like English, Esperanto doesn’t do this. The word for “the” is always “la”. It never changes in the plural. This means the student has time to actually learn the language, instead of stressing about whether a word is masculine or not.
Pronunciation:
Some words are hard to pronounce, which makes learning harder, and stunts confidence.
For example, French very rarely pronounces letters at the end of words. Aller, allez, allais, allait, allaient … all are pronounced the same, something like English, “allay”.
I then mentioned that some words look the same but are pronounced differently. The example on screen was:
“I read the newspaper …”
I then brought up “and then throw it in the bin.” Following that, I brought up “this morning and then threw it in the bin.” That illustrated perfectly the problems of pronunciation, and how this element makes learning harder. I countered this by saying: “Esperanto has a phonetic alphabet. There are 28 letters, each correponding to one unique sound. It is totally phonetic.”
There were more points like this that I shan’t include in the report. They were: numbers and irregular verbs. I explained that Esperanto says “ten-one” for 11, “two-ten-two” for 22, and asked the children to give me 43: “four-ten-three”, came the reply.
As for the verbs … well, it took all of two minutes to talk them through –as, -is, -os, giving them examples using “trinki”, “teon”, and “kafon”. The children were able to get the form everytime I asked something along the lines of “Ŝi [“she”] kafon yesterday?” “Li [“he”] teon tomorrow?” I thought that that was a strong point clearly demonstrated in front of the teachers. “The children have learned to conjugate in past, present, and future for all persons in two minutes. I remember having entire fifty-five minute lessons on the present tense of pouvoir, vouloir, aller, and avoir in French … each!”
Now that they had had their first sample of Esperanto sentence construction, I gave them a little more information.
“An –o is a flag to tell you that you have a noun.” The children gave me the textbook answer to the question “What is a noun?” I gave them back some words that were nouns but didn’t meet those qualities. I then gave them the Esperanto versions for these words; amikeco, nacieco, vivo. As part of language awareness, I said that one has to be able to identify nouns immediately, because the words that you use for “the” or descriptions in other languages depend on the gender of the noun. I also made the sly point that textbooks and exams throw the words around … so they’d better understand it!
I undertook the same thing for –a endings and plural endings.
By this point, my time was coming to a stop, so I left them with an image on screen. There were Esperanto sentences with the –o’s and –a’s colour coded. Underneath them were French sentences in which I had coloured the nouns and adjectives in the same colour as the –o’s and –a’s. In other words, I just demonstrated to the pupils and their teachers that in two minutes, they had been able to recognise the adjectives and nouns of a different language, thanks to Esperanto.
That was the end of my talk. They thanked me very warmly, and I them. I apologised to the head of department that I hadn’t distributed the activity booklets that I had intended to, and that they would now have to go into the bin. “Not to worry”, she smiled at me. “I’m perfectly sure that we’ll be able to make use of those!”
Tags: Presentation, School, Springboard
