Chapter Nine
Real Life Experiences With Esperanto
This is the eighth chapter of a work-in-progress, Esperanto: A Language for the Global Village. by Sylvan Zaft.
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I would like to start by comparing my personal experiences with two languages I have learned, French and Esperanto. I studied French for four years in high school with excellent teachers. I also took a one semester university class in classical French literature in which everything—readings, lectures, discussions, tests—was in French. From my second year in high school I read French literature on my own. I read an occasional book in French while doing research in history.
For many years I subscribed to French periodicals. I have read thousands of articles in the language as well as more than a hundred books. Although I have never visited France I have been told by native speakers that I now have a good accent. I speak the language fluently and I read it rapidly and well. However, when I speak, I make enormous numbers of mistakes, mistakes of gender, of verb form, of idioms. Although my French is quite understandable and I can certainly get by in the language, my French no doubt would grate on a Parisian's nerves.
When I read I like to have a dictionary handy because on most pages that I read there are a few words or expressions which I do not know. I can write in fairly correct French but to do so I need to have reference books at hand. I have to constantly consult dictionaries about genders of nouns and adjectives as well as idiomatic expressions. I also have to check the spelling of words. I need to have a book that conjugates verbs because I have to constantly check on certain verbs to figure out if they are regular or irregular and what the appropriate form is. It takes me many times longer to write in French than in English because I have to check out so many things. Even so, no matter how much trouble I take, errors slip through. I am always afraid of making a mistake and being open, like a school child, to corrections. When speaking the language I am afraid of putting in the wrong word and making myself appear ridiculous. This is after spending seven or eight thousand hours with the language.
There is no way I will ever be comfortable speaking or writing the language with native speakers. This is not because I am stupid. I have plenty of fine academic credentials and I scored very well on standardized tests. The problem is not with my mind. It is just that French, like English, like Hindi, like Arabic, like Chinese is a fantastically difficult language for non-native speakers to learn.
My experience with Esperanto has been dramatically different. First of all I taught the language to myself, something that would have been impossible with French. After three months of rather intensive self-study I was ready to write long articles in the language for the newsletter of our state association and I was ready to correspond with people all over the world. After receiving a few letters I rarely needed a dictionary to read a letter. I used dictionaries extensively to check that I was using the right word but I never had to use dictionaries to check the spelling of words which I knew how to pronounce. I used and use Esperanto dictionaries when writing about as much as I use English dictionaries when writing in my native language. My use of English dictionaries is mainly to check spelling. (Spell-check computer programs help a lot, but they are helpless in the face of homonyms such as boar and bore, there and their, right and write and two and to and too.) My use of Esperanto dictionaries is mainly to check that the word that comes to mind actually exists and is not one that I am making up by Esperantizing an English or French word.
From the beginning of my international correspondence, I was able to express any idea in Esperanto that I could have expressed in English. My correspondents in countries such as the Soviet Union, Brazil, China, Japan, Senegal, East Germany and the Netherlands, understood me and I understood them just as well as if we shared the same native tongue.
I carried on a debate about the purported merits of Communism with a dedicated Communist who was a professor of history in Gorky, Russia. An East German correspondent hated life under Communism. He told me about singers who were no longer permitted to sing in public because their songs were considered to be against the regime. He told me that the medicine which his wife needed desperately was completely unavailable in his country, at least to ordinary people. (She was fortunate to have an uncle in West Germany who could send her the medicine.) He told me how the Communists had imprisoned his father in a way that undermined his health and led to his premature death. His father's crime was to participate in a strike of streetcar workers.
My correspondent in Vladivostok told me how he created a Soviet-American friendship club and how the members of the club would bake a cake in the form of an American flag. He told me about how things were in such short supply that he had to get up and stand in line at four in the morning in order to be able to buy a television set six hours later. If he got in line later they would all be sold out before his turn came. (I recently got a letter from him in which he told me how he had bought a sports car and drove through the countryside of his part of Asiatic Russia for the very first time. He wrote the letter on his computer using a Russian translation of the same word processing program that I use.)
In the dying days of Communism he told how the authorities offered him membership in the Communist Party. He explained to me how he got out of it by saying that he "did not deserve such a high honor."
My correspondent in East Germany wrote in excellent Esperanto. He had once won a prize for translating in the language. His letters were publishable as they came from his typewriter and, later, from the computer which a West German relative provided him with. My Vladivostok correspondent made a good number of errors, more errors than I did, but we had no trouble understanding each other.
In each case I was not using their language and they were not using my language. We were both using our language because Esperanto is a language that belongs equally to every individual who learns it. So we were comfortable using our language with each other. We were not afraid of provoking laughter by inadvertently saying something ridiculous due to the wrong choice of a word.
A Chinese professor visiting the United States described Esperanto as "a linguistic handshake." When two people shake hands, each person reaches out part way. If you speak Esperanto each person has already made a reasonable effort in order to learn the language so that they can both communicate with each other. This makes for quite a different kind of experience than the Chinese professor has when he speaks in English to Americans. He has already made an enormous effort to learn English imperfectly. The people he talks to have made no special effort at all.
I have never traveled abroad to use Esperanto. Nonetheless I have had some interesting experiences speaking the language here in the United States. About ten months after I started to study the language, I had the occasion to show a visitor, Joel Brozovsky, around the Detroit area. During the few hours we spent together we spoke almost no English. I was stunned to find that I spoke the language fluently and understood it well. It almost felt like cheating, being fluent in a language after spending only some months with it. No doubt I made errors but nowhere near the number of errors I would have made in French after spending many thousands of hours over a period of more than thirty years with that language. There was no comparison at all between the enormous effort it took me to learn an imperfect French and the effort it took me to reach the point where I could communicate comfortably and effectively if not flawlessly in Esperanto.
Joel Brozovsky was a young American who had taken seven thousand dollars with him to visit Europe after studying Esperanto in an introductory course. He planned to stay as long as his savings would last. The seven thousand dollars enabled Brozowsky to travel in Europe and the Far East for three years. Esperantists tend to welcome visiting Esperantists, and so many people invited him to stay with them that his money lasted that long a time. Of course, after those three years in "Esperantoland" he spoke the language "like a native."
Two years later, in 1989, I drove a Chinese visitor from Chicago, where we had attended an Esperanto convention, to a Detroit suburb not far from where I lived. We spent several hours in the car and ate together at a restaurant. She spoke no English and I spoke no Chinese. We got along just fine in our common, easier-to-learn international language.
Earlier that same year I was vacationing with a friend on Cape Cod. It was very early in the summer, before the crowds arrived. One day we went down to a beach to do some bird watching. Two very old men came up. One of them went swimming while the other waited. We chatted with the waiting man. He told us that the swimmer was his brother-in-law, an ethnic Russian from Lithuania who spoke no English. During his visit they communicated in German. My friend asked if the swimmer knew Esperanto. It turned out that he had studied it more than sixty years previously, when he was a teen-ager.
When the old man got out of the water I started to speak to him in Esperanto. His eyes lit up and he started to talk so rapidly that I had to ask him to please slow down. He told me that he had known people who knew Zamenhof. We met once more on the beach and, after he returned to the Soviet Union, we corresponded for some time.
Esperanto has made all kinds of contacts possible between people. Those who learn it tend to be friendly and idealistic. Sometimes people from two different language groups meet through Esperanto and marry. Their children grow up in a home in which Esperanto is the home language. In this way there are some hundreds of native speakers of Esperanto, all of whom, of course, are bilingual.
The language spoken in such homes is a highly expressive one. This is because of the tremendous freedom which speakers of Esperanto enjoy when it comes to word formation. In languages like English, French, German and so on, great expressiveness is achieved by means of idioms. Idioms are colorful expressions which mean something other than they appear to mean. Idioms make a language very rich, but they present an enormous obstacle to non-native speakers. As we shall see in a later chapter, Esperanto achieves its great expressiveness in an entirely different way, one that not only does not add to a student's learning burden, but actually reduces it.
On to Chapter 10: No Stumbling Over Idioms
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