Most people fail at learning a natural language (beyond simple sentences such as "my name is …") because it requires many years of study. Regularity of Esperanto makes it possible to become fluent in a fraction of that time. But in the end, whether someone succeeds in learning a languages or not depends not only on how easy it is to learn, but also on how much daily exposure there is to the language and on the personal motivation for studying it.

And a complex sentence in Esperanto is easier to build than in english or german, allowing people to focus on the content of the discussion instead of the language. There isn’t any new fangled art of grammar to learn in Esperanto: All the grammar and a good deal of words fits into a tiny pocket-book. Add to that the special words of your topic, and you can lead deep discussions.

And if you say that it might be harder for other people to learn a new language than for you, why force 90% of them to learn a far more complicated language instead of the simple Esperanto? English isn’t universally known, and the cost for learning english is many school years. The time which gets freed when learning Esperanto instead of english could be used to learn programming – or any other topic.

Typical time-to-conversational-speaking ranges from one weekend to a few months for adults. I learned it myself by just reading the lord of the rings in esperanto (la kunularo de’l ringo) and doing about 2 3-pages long excercises. Here’s an example roadmap for learning Esperanto in two months with one hour each day: http://edufire.com/content/articles/158-becoming-…

Compare that to french: I learned it in school for about 4 years, 4 hours a week. I can barely watch the news and I’m able to find my way in Geneva with quite some struggling, but not much more. Reading a book in french is out of question. Reading a book in esperanto works quite nicely.

Or compare it to Spanish, an easier language. My wife is spanish, and I can now understand about 30% of a normal conversation (after living with her for 2 years).

So it’s the other way round: Natural languages are very hard to learn when compared to Esperanto, and that is also true for english. Yes, many people hear english all the time, but there’s a huge difference between being able to say “I want eaten a chicken” and real english. And besides: By the same logic, many youth here in Germany should be quite proficient in Japanese, thanks to Anime. But do you find most of them really talking in Japanese – aside from Arigato and other short phrases?

Or try to find people in france who speak english. When I was in Paris this year, I had to unbury my french skills to get a ticket at the railway station in paris at the main airport. And it was a huge struggle.

Compare that to going to an Esperanto meeting after not having spoken Esperanto for years and understanding 90% without problems.

So Esperanto as designed language is very easy to learn. It has no exceptions, clear phonetics (every letter has exactly one sound) and only 18 grammar rules. And it has a word-building system which allows you to speak using very few roots (so you have to learn far less words to be able to speak fluently): Lerni = Learn. Lernanto = someone who learns. Lernilo: A tool for learning. Blogilo: A tool for blogging. Lernujo = The land of learning. Lernigi = teach. Lerniĝi = teach yourself …

Do you know the phrase “the perfect is the enemy of the good”? If you don’t do what’s good because you wait for the perfect, you’ll be stuck with the bad forever.

What could help here are computers. Once technology is sufficiently strong to allow high-quality real-time native-language-to-native-language translations in internet conversations, we will have solved the problem for online communities. Unfortunately we're still far from a perfect solution.

Also they are something Esperanto-Speakers have been saying for over 100 years. As more and more people try to cross the boundary of their home countries, the language barrier will be more and more troubling, till at some point a neutral (and much easier to learn) second language for everyone will be beneficial even to those who now learn english as first language. There is even a paper evaluating the cost of having a hard to learn language as lingua franca. Sadly I don’t have it at hand right now, so I can only supply a source of general information http://www.uea.org/info/angle/an_ghisdatigo.html

For Japanese and Chinese people, english is prohibitively hard to learn – much more so than for german people.

If some system, mailing list, or wiki could be set up for a purpose such as this, I think it would help this situation. I know I'd gladly spend an hour or two a day helping out.

Answers would have to be optimised for the use mentioned above before we could fully profit from the opportunities it provides us with, but it would:
1) Make bug reporting a more pleasant and helping experience for everyone.
2) Reduce the number of bugs we have to deal with as triagers.

Downsides would be: the work needed to make Answers suitable for this, but most importantly: getting people to provide the support and triage the questions in Answers. Many people would probably rather use other support methods, like the forum, a mailing list or IRC and we should be careful to prevent users having to go through the whole riddle again when they're referred to Answers by someone in that medium.

I understand that the developers who will eventually work on the bugs use English and that it may take a lot of effort to translate problems from a foreign language to English but the risk in ignoring non-English bug reports is that important issues never get resolved and non-English users feel like second class citizens because they can't report their problems to someone who can do something about them. Any suggestion on how to resolve this would be welcome.

It probably depends on the size of the translators pool how people will react to your contributions. In general I think you could say that people would welcome any contribution. However, contributions would probably be better received by communities with little translators, like Frisian, Esperanto or Klingon, than in communities like the Spanish, which has translated nearly everything there is to translate and has probably a lot more policies, customs and habits.

I wonder what the thoughts are on non-native speakers doing translations. I did a few Japanese translations years ago when I was still studying it (I'm too out of practice now to be useful), but I wonder how well-received it is when a non-native person submits translations.

I haven’t seen anyone get flamed on any of the Ubuntu mailing lists I’m on for their English. Often they apologise about their “bad English” (which tends to turn out to be quite good!) beforehand and get replies back saying not to apologise and complimenting their skills at learning another language. I think I most often see this in Ubuntu Women. That’s more likely the rate of new people being greater there than, say, on ubuntu-devel.

If everyone here would mark the bug as affecting them!

I suppose the hope is that :

1) We become more tolerant of bad grammer.
2) We ask questions where there is confusion rather than dismiss the confusion
3) We cope better with misunderstandings (that could lead to who knows what: embarrassment; extra work; …)

Of course, this relies upon native english speakers being able to determine from the text alone whether or not an author of some post is actually meaning to say what they say.

I live in Sheffield in South Yorkshire in England. When I moved here I was surprised to hear the word 'while' where I would have expected the word 'until', or maybe just 'til', or even 'to'.

Question: "What hours do you work?"
Answer I would expect: "9 to 5"
Answer I would expect in Sheffield: "9 while 5"

It has a certain programmers logic to it though. But my point is this. Confusion is inherent in the language. Native speakers say confusing things as well as non native speakers, perhaps there is a belief amongst non-native speakers to think that native speakers must always be correct in their usage of the language, but that's often not true. (Especially with what I write!)

So I think it's pretty hard to turn this realisation of advantage into practical advice. Any suggestions?

You can't assume people don't mean what they say and start questioning everything, where would that leave you?

Moreover English is my fourth language,so that creates confusion too.

I think this bug is very pertinent to your post. Can you take the time to comment on this bug?

Rich 'nixternal' Johnson

Esperanto is a wonderful ideal and I do think that such a language could help, but that hasn't been put to the test yet and I think it will never be. It is not a trendy language, not a popular one and since it is not a language of a country that can rise to power (English only became the world language after the rise of the United States) I don't think it has much chance to become something people will want to learn. But maybe I'll be proven wrong, who knows?

I'm one of those who think that an easy, yet flexible and expressive auxiliary language such as esperanto would be not only more fair, but also a lot easier for most people. Of course, it won't happen any time soon, unless we all learn such an auxiliary language at school in all countries.