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That's, "La angla estas tro malfacila! Parolu esperante."

Come on over to Lernu.net and learn Esperanto for real.

This site is pretty well done for learning a language (Esperanto in this case): http://en.lernu.net/ For Japanese, there's this game: http://lrnj.com/ Haven't tried it, but I like the idea. :)

If you're interested purely in fun and mental training, take a look at Toki Pona: a language with just 120 words in which it is nevertheless possible to hold a simple conversation. If you'd like a combination of fun and mental training with some practical utility, there's Esperanto: considerably easier to learn than most languages and a hundred thousand speakers spread over the world, nearly all of whom are well educated. If you only want practicaly utility and don't mind putting in a lot of work, I would guess that Chinese is probably a good choice, though it all depends on your personal circumstances.

Oh my God!
I used to think Babelfish was, like, state-of-the-art...
Now I realize we're not better off than stupid dictionary look-ups people do all the time - and for which the 1855 book is famous for.
What a fucking shame the state of machine-translation.

Now's the time for the Esperanto plug - a better tool.

I guess brains still beat computers when it comes to languages.

English is wiping other languages out

This paper (http://www.arxiv.org/abs/cs.CL/0006032), by Xerox Research Center Europe says non-English language presesence on the Web is growing at a faster pace than English. Surprising data: Esperanto beats Welsh, Lithuainian and Latvian (amongst others).

English as a lingua franca is a losing proposition. I know no one truly fluent and with good command in English that has learned it from a school. They all lived abroad. OTOH, I know francophones and speakers of Italian that are fluent and indeed learned them at foreign language schools (including myself). Of course, this observation is biased.

I mean, it's absolutely amazing how some very smart people with over a decade of contact with English have absolutely terrible command of the spoken language (while being able to write pretty good English). This phenomenom happens because English is highly irregular(*). Of course, increasingly we will resort to automated tools when we could simply reach out to a language tool. I feel this problem will only grow in the field of documentation for free and open source software (ideally, we would document in an auxlang and machine-translated it to native). We tend to think that English is acceptable. But it is not. English is too difficult. Additionally, it is not fair. The UK saves 100 Euros/year/inhabitant just by speaking English, whereas other countries have to spend a huge amount on coaching students in a language most will inexorably fail in, despite the cultural invasion of US American music and films. Anyone who's a native English speaker and has ventured out of his bubble knows that the idea you can just go to any corner of the world and communicate in English is false. Ex-colonies give you a false impression, too.

BTW, I know this is going to sound crazy, but Esperanto is the most cost-effective solution http://www.lernu.net/. I'm saying rational, optimized, here. I have some fluency in Spanish, French, English, Italian, Portuguese (native), and intermediate German, beginning Japanese and Russian - oh, and Esperanto (just started this last week and half, due to my reading on it), so you can imagine I have at least some ground to sustain an opinion like that. When you get to Level II, III, or IV languages - as defined by the USA's Defense Language Institute coming from a Level I standpoint you begin to appreciate what the difficulty for non-English/Romance language speakers must be. For instance, Russian verbal aspect is very poor compared to Portuguese, which has the most intricate verbal aspects of Indo-European languages, probably (and this is not an idea of my own, BTW). OTOH, the 6-case declension system of Russian can be really hard for those who speak a Romance tongue. One thesis I have as to why Linus Torvalds is such a smart guy is because speakers of Finnish must keep 16 cases of declension in their heads. That alone ought to make a child have a few more IQ points! :-))

For more on "the language problem", YouTube has a fascinating 9-part series by a gentleman who whas a UN translator for many years, Mr. Claude Piron (he has become an Esperanto proponent, due to the many problems he witnessed (**) and based also on his extensive knowledge and proficiency)(***)

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=claude+piron&search=Search (Spoken in French).

(*) "Query does not rhyme with very,
neither does fury sound like bury,
dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth,
job, Job, bo

The Esperanto language community has something called "Pasporta Servo" (English wikipedia article here).

It always seemed to me that this would be a fun way to travel. You can go to foreign countries, get a place to crash, an interesting host, and not feel like a clod for only speaking English. I guess I like the idea of traveling and meeting people half-way.

Plus, it's a way to expand your mind and make a statement for peace and global understanding by learning esperanto (as if you needed a reason!) :-)

Hmm... that reminds me, I'm behind on my language lessons at lernu.

CleanIneter.net, a "christian" filtering service, uses an animated gif on their "BLOCKED!" page. It looks like a security camera which is pointing at the blocked URL and then it swings up to look out at you!

It's surprisingly disconcerting, despite the fact that I've seen it so often. I guess a lot of words in Esperanto look like naughty words in English... like "Asia Carrera" which I swear only means "Taiwanese Automotive Parts". ;-)

My first camera had a viewfinder like a door on the top of the box that you looked down into. My grandma let me have it when I found it in her junk closet. Film was impossible to find in that size any more but I was just using it as a toy anyway. My next one had the little hole you look through. Then I got the digital with the screen on the back. All that in just 40 years. Big deal.

I'm it total agreement that this guy missed all the really major things that would shock someone from the 1920s.

1. Another world war (Duh!)
2. Communism
3. Television
4. Nuclear weapons/energy
5. Space flight
6. Computers and the Internet

Or socially...

1. Modern feminine swimwear. Woohoo! :-)
2. Everyone drives half an hour to work and hardly knows their neighbors.
3. Everyone has telephones everywhere.

More telling, I think, would be the developments that people in the 1920s thought were "just around the corner"... but weren't.

1. Farms in even the most developed nations still use manual labor instead of being fully automated.
2. The "war to end all wars", didn't.
3. ...and despite practically-cost-free global communication, businesses and governments still waste tons of money making bad translations into multiple languages instead of using an obvious solution like Esperanto.

Learnu Esperanto!

I recommend Esperanto...

Unless you answered "yes", most of that time you spent "learning" a foreign language was wasted. I support the goal of foreign language fluency but it's pretty obvious that the methods used in most US schools are not achieving much.

There are better ways to learn foreign languages. Schools should be using them.

There is one such way which, surprisingly, isn't much of a departure from the way it's done right now but produces far better results: teach one year of Esperanto first, and then procede with the so-called "natural" languages. In one study, French secondary-school (highschool) students had one year of Esperanto and then three years of either English or German. At the end of the four year program, they were more advanced than the students who had gone through four contiguous years of English or German, and they could read and write fluently in Esperanto as well!

There are theories about why it turns out this way but the important point is that it works. Not only do the students progress further toward the original goal but they also gain another language to a point where they can use it for real-life correspondence. Even if the current system isn't ready to handle more efficient language-learning techniques (used by language schools and them military, for example), this system of teaching Esperanto as a "foreign language primer" could be implemented just as quickly as some teachers could learn it... which is to say, in only a couple years.

Just so you know I'm not pulling this out of my ear, consider that I've been teaching myself Esperanto for only two years now. Starting from a great web site called Lernu.net, I can already comprehend and participate in Esperanto-language meetings, read unabridged literature in Esperanto, and instant-message chat with girls, er, people all over the world in Esperanto. Some of my Esperantist net-pals use Skype and PalTalk a lot too, though I don't have that much time for that myself.

Programi en Esperanto estus facila, krom neniaj programlingvoj uzas la internacia lingvon! Ecx la latinaj parolantoj havas ilian programlingvon!

Why don't you give Esperanto a try?

• gentle introduction
• several courses
• vocabulary drills
• user community
• chat, forums, message boxes
• exams
• music/songs in Esperanto
• and much more...

Cxu vi parolas Esperanton?

Esperanto (Background/Tutorials) has been doing this for a while.

... had an opportunity to create a global verbal language too, but did we use it?

Hey, it's never too late!

Pretentious? Special? Come on, it's the most ordinary thing!

Here in Europe, practically everyone knows at least two languages, some know three or more -- if not fluently, at least stumblingly. Practically everyone here has had the experience that achurch describes -- at least to some extent, depending on fluency in different languages. There's nothing special about this experience, nothing unusual, certainly nothing to be pretentious about. It's just a very, very ordinary fact of life.

It is, however, very unfortunate that so many Americans (and some others) are monolingual, and therefore limited in cultural experience and scope of thought. Especially considering that the US is the only superpower! Because of this superpower role I really, really wish Americans had a broader outlook on the world.

Don't be insecure about this, it's such a mundane thing. Instead of decrying it, learn a language, broaden your outlook! It can really be a very rewarding experience. Here's an unusually easy language with an unusually broad cultural scope that you might try.

"I checked with an Arabic speaker in the company who was also a Muslim about what the chant meant and it was from the Koran. He went ballistic. It was an incredible insult to Islam." He asked for the game to be withdrawn but it was issued against his advice in the United States in the belief that it would not be noticed.

Seems to me that the real problem will not be solved by holding geography classes. Here the problem was clearly identified within the company before product release. The warning was ignored because someone thought that software released in the US would remain isolated within the target market. Americans understanding Arabic? or software released in the US ending up in the middle east? What were the odds of that, eh?

What it shows is that neither nations nor "markets" can adequately define people. Can you imagine how silly it would be for them to make a release of Football-game software specifically for each team's home region so as not to offend the local fans? Did you know that some radio stations are already playing songs tailored in just this way?!? To me, the fact that some corporate marketing goons think they can classify me and expect me to like it... that's offensive.

Refuse to be classified! Don't let something arbitrary isolate you from other people; not nation, not religion or customs, not even language. Cross a line. Overcome a barrier.

This is one of the main reasons I encourage people to learn Esperanto like I'm doing. What kind of difference do you think it might make, for example, if the people of Iraq and the US were able to freely communicate? Not just a few foreign-educated men but factory workers and dentists, grocery-clerks and stay-at-home moms... What if you had a pen-pal in Iraq? Do you think you might get a different story than what you're being fed by the news media?

Au contraire, mon frere. Esperanto is a language that everyone finds to be easy. Please feel free to take a no-cost online course: here

I worked in the eLearning field for a while, and every LMS I had to work with was a waste of time. Including Blackboard.

The organization I was working for spend LOTS of money developing a system that would allow teachers to collaboratively create courses online (the LMS, reversed). They set it up so that it would output SCORM.

It turned out that while Blackboard SAID it supported SCORM, we couldn't actually find anything SCORM-related in the software... or the documentation.

The best example of online learning that I've seen is Lernu.net. If a couple of hacker Esperantists can beat Blackboard, so can you.

So I've been pleasantly surprised at how much easier I've found Esperanto to learn than other languages. In 6 months I am already getting pretty good, easily reading and writing it every day, as compared to years of frustration with other languages. In fairness, I am probably more motivated to learn a foreign language now than I was in school - but part of that is because I've been so encouraged by my faster progress... it's a postive feedback loop :)

I highly recommend checking it out to anyone who felt frustrated studying languages in school. lernu.net is a great place to start and learn the basics quickly. (And contrary to some of the bogus rants you see, there is definitely an Esperanto community, culture, history, literature, etc. with plenty of people around the world you can communicate with.)

I'm a full-time volunteer for the World Esperanto Youth Organization in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. As of July 2002, I've been speaking Esperanto as my primary language travelling for six months through Brazil and Europe and then volunteering here starting in January 2003. I'm also a board member of Esperanto@Internet which has done projects like lernu! which is one of the best free language teaching environments online as well as the founder of the Wikipedia in Esperanto which has over 8,000 encyclopedia articles after two years of work by an international team from over 25 countries and is now the 9th largest language in the project.

As for a high-rate of IT Esperanto speakers, I think a lot of it comes from the fact that we aren't put off by the word artificial because we're familiar with fields of study like artificial intelligence. Also, people working in IT are more likely to like the idea of a "logical language" even though Esperanto isn't really logically per se since no living language can ever be completely logical. Esperanto was initiated out of the need for a just international language and started just like an Open Source Project. So, another reason that many Esperanto speakers are techies is simply because we tend to use the Internet more than other people.

For those of you wanting to learn a language that is spoken by approximately 2 million people around the world, start learning Esperanto today!

Now try to explain why the Esperanto Wikipedia has 4469 articles making it the fourth largest language edition of the Wikipedia.