Useful International Language.

[kiwibonga]

No, it's not "for or against Ido," or whatever...

It's more like "Is a world language reform a plausible achievement in today's society" OR "Is there a chance that they will start -forcibly- teaching Ido to kids in school in our lifetime"

And well, in my opinion, there is not a chance in hell that it will happen this century... I already outlined the reason: there's other, more important global changes that need to be undertaken, and they still don't seem to be taken seriously, #1 problem being fossil fuel (in my opinion).



As for the ideal international language... I don't think a letter-based written language is a good solution. Syllable-based languages like japanese and korean are good when it comes to written communication. Sentences are shorter, and spelling mistakes become very rare. Ideograms (i.e. Kanji / chinese) need to be removed, but a big alphabet of maybe 50 characters each representing a syllable or final would be very interesting. As for actual grammar, particles are also things that we do not have in "western" languages, which can be used to indicate the tense of the verb, or can indicate a level of politeness, or can indicate an affirmation, a suggestion, an order, a question, etc...

Ido seems to me like a mix of french and italian/latin, with hints of other languages... HUGELY problematic.

There is already such a problem: English is the main language for business. It is much more accessible to people whose language has a roman alphabet already

I think it's unfair that the western world is being given this jump start. If a new language must be used as an international one, it should be equally difficult to learn for everyone. Asia + the middle east = pretty much half of the world population. But the business world is currently dominated by English speakers. Ido would not fix that problem at all.

Also, I noticed that you wrote it takes 7 years to learn English, but 5 weeks to learn Ido?

When I came to the US, I did not understand English at all. I knew simple things such as "I like fries" and "The red cat says meow" ; I was unable to ask for water at mc donalds, and it took me at least 30 minutes to understand that the domino's pizza guy cannot sell individual slices. My mom put me in a tennis camp for 4 weeks, with americans only. By the fourth week my conversational english was near-fluent, a year later, I could fool anyone into thinking that I was a native english speaker.

Learning a new language is easy if you already know another one. Learning English when you can't speak any language probably does indeed take 7 years, but don't tell me a kid can learn the totality of Ido as a native language in 5 weeks. A full featured language will have somewhere between 15000 and 30000 words, and you probably will need to know 10,000 words or more in order to be considered fluent.

Of course it really depends on how you define "learning" ; but if learning is to English what learning is to Ido, then the 7 year : 5 week figure is clearly wrong ; whoever was used in the English learning statistic had part of their brain surgically removed or something...

My point is, if we're going to use something with a roman alphabet, no accents, simplified grammar, and lots of flexibility that allows you to create new words, might as well use English!

[Rhymer2]

Crap, I don't understand this board. When I log in I can only see the guild boards and the trash board, so I'll be posting as a guest and use Rhymer2 as a name because I can't figure it out :X

As for the ideal international language... I don't think a letter-based written language is a good solution. Syllable-based languages like japanese and korean are good when it comes to written communication. Sentences are shorter, and spelling mistakes become very rare. Ideograms (i.e. Kanji / chinese) need to be removed, but a big alphabet of maybe 50 characters each representing a syllable or final would be very interesting. As for actual grammar, particles are also things that we do not have in "western" languages, which can be used to indicate the tense of the verb, or can indicate a level of politeness, or can indicate an affirmation, a suggestion, an order, a question, etc...

I do think a letter-based language is good for international communication. There is way, way less to learn and Ido can be used on any computer. If the goal is international communication, it needs to be able to be used on about every medium in can use, which would be problematic with a language like Japanese. As for particles, I think agglutinative suffixes/preffixes do the job nicely.

Ido seems to me like a mix of french and italian/latin, with hints of other languages... HUGELY problematic.

There is already such a problem: English is the main language for business. It is much more accessible to people whose language has a roman alphabet already

I think it's unfair that the western world is being given this jump start. If a new language must be used as an international one, it should be equally difficult to learn for everyone. Asia + the middle east = pretty much half of the world population. But the business world is currently dominated by English speakers. Ido would not fix that problem at all.

Ido is not a mix of any language. Yes, it does take its root words from current Indo-European languages, but the grammar is nothing like these.

English will be the lingua franca for business so long as the US continue to dominate the world. As the US are a dying power, they might have to step down soon and another language will take it up - which would be ideal if it was an international language like Ido! It might even happen sooner than that, look up how Esperanto was proposed to the UN(I think) but rejected due to shortcomings. Ido fixes all the shortcomings of Esperanto.

As for the jumpstart part, Ido is a neutral language. Nobody is given a jumpstart. Japanese can be romanised and so can Korean. The Latin alphabet is the easiest of the bunch to learn. How would Ido fix this problem? Easy -- just because it's easier to learn than English!

Also, I noticed that you wrote it takes 7 years to learn English, but 5 weeks to learn Ido?

When I came to the US, I did not understand English at all. I knew simple things such as "I like fries" and "The red cat says meow" ; I was unable to ask for water at mc donalds, and it took me at least 30 minutes to understand that the domino's pizza guy cannot sell individual slices. My mom put me in a tennis camp for 4 weeks, with americans only. By the fourth week my conversational english was near-fluent, a year later, I could fool anyone into thinking that I was a native english speaker.

You're talking about total immersion, I'm talking about regular courses. Yes, it does take about 7 years to master English, if 6/7 years were useless, why would they make that subject stick around for so long in the first place?

I cannot say, because I was myself in semi-immersion, but some people my age has on their 6th year of regular English courses and still can't speak it for peanuts.

Learning a new language is easy if you already know another one. Learning English when you can't speak any language probably does indeed take 7 years, but don't tell me a kid can learn the totality of Ido as a native language in 5 weeks. A full featured language will have somewhere between 15000 and 30000 words, and you probably will need to know 10,000 words or more in order to be considered fluent.

Of course it really depends on how you define "learning" ; but if learning is to English what learning is to Ido, then the 7 year : 5 week figure is clearly wrong ; whoever was used in the English learning statistic had part of their brain surgically removed or something...

Hmm, I'd need to look up the number of root words, but since Ido is an agglutinative language, you don't need a ton of words to describe things. It's kind of like Finnish : you take a root word, jumble stuff together and you have a new word. Last time I checked the official Ido dictionary had ~400 pages. It's not alot, but there's stuff that modifies the sense and everything. For example, adjectives always end in -a. Let's take the word for beautiful, bela. Replace the -a suffix with -e and you transform the adjective in an adverb(bela -> bele = beautifully).

My point is, if we're going to use something with a roman alphabet, no accents, simplified grammar, and lots of flexibility that allows you to create new words, might as well use English!

That's like saying we should use a Pentium 2 because it's good enough compared to a P4. Why not use something that has all of the above and more, and is considerably easier to learn?

[Rhymer2]

Crap, no edit tool on guests -_-

anyway, what i'm trying to say is... if you had begun this thread in a rationalistic way , sketching out the benefits of a language like IDO before ending with your link, i'm not sure if anyone would have read it- they might have detected school intruding on their free time and immediately run away.  so i see a bit of a dilemma with this subject, and maybe many others.

That's what I should have done, sorry. I wasn't trying to be a jackass, or to make fun of anything. I was looking for interested people, and I had no intention to laugh at the subject.

[vollendetII]

You're talking about total immersion, I'm talking about regular courses. Yes, it does take about 7 years to master English, if 6/7 years were useless, why would they make that subject stick around for so long in the first place?

I cannot say, because I was myself in semi-immersion, but some people my age has on their 6th year of regular English courses and still can't speak it for peanuts.

Well, you can master english in a shorter period of time than 7 years. It all depends on the person and how hard they are willing to work and how much time they are willing to put in to learn a new language. If they don't care and think learning a new language is a waste of time it would take a very long time to learn. Outside of classroom experiences help as well, as kiwi said. Sitting in a classroom watching movies and doing page and page of exercises to learn a language will do nothing. It all depends on work ethic. 

[Ybom]

It all depends on work ethic.

If work ethic was all that it depended on, then I would have learned Spanish by now. I think more of the problem involves people knowing they want to be immersed rather than sit in a class all day trying to do sentence translation, but they know they can't afford to do something like that. Screw commercialization and the school system, too; they are the real problems behind this.

[Diabllo]

English is the international language.

If English is really the international language, explain the GB jaja'ers?

I just say Jaja for fun.. English is the only language I know.

[Ransternz]

Let's destroy culture, yay!

[Crono]

we might all be speaking chinese!

Dear god no

[Shaft]

Really though. Why master the language? Once you learn about half the language, its actually almost more than adequate.

When I mean half the language, I mean not getting into crap live proverbs and stuff.

The bad thing is, the Malay language as a whole fucking bunch of that. Believe me.

And its also a pain in the ass to pluralize something in Malay. Go learn it, and laugh about it.

[vollendetII]

It all depends on work ethic.

If work ethic was all that it depended on, then I would have learned Spanish by now. I think more of the problem involves people knowing they want to be immersed rather than sit in a class all day trying to do sentence translation, but they know they can't afford to do something like that. Screw commercialization and the school system, too; they are the real problems behind this.

Oops. Maybe I shouldn't have said all. :x. Yeah, that's apart of what I was saying before. Why stick yourself in a classroom learning stuff that really doesnt apply to everyday life when you can get out and learn it from people in a community, that's what my mom and grandmother did when they moved from Nova Scotia to Quebec.

[Ybom]

Oops. Maybe I shouldn't have said all. :x. Yeah, that's apart of what I was saying before. Why stick yourself in a classroom learning stuff that really doesnt apply to everyday life when you can get out and learn it from people in a community, that's what my mom and grandmother did when they moved from Nova Scotia to Quebec.

Just remember that we're human and don't kick your own butt for such a simple mistake. I only jumped on you about it because I didn't want someone else reading to blindly agree with it without hearing what I had said first; said it for them and not you ^^.

What Tony and I are ranting about here is that Ido makes it possible to almost have fun learning it in a school environment, since you become so fluent at it at a crazy pace. I haven't learned Ido quite yet, simply because I'm very lazy and want to learn it with my fiancee, but hell if I don't know most of the grammar already, and I learned that in about a week. I think I'll have the roots down by the time she is living with me though.

Conclusion; being able to drive 150 mph down the highway is much more fun than driving 20 mph. Just like learning a lot of Ido in a month is much more fun than just a tad of English in half a year.

[Arthropod]

What Tony and I are ranting about here is that Ido makes it possible to almost have fun learning it in a school environment, since you become so fluent at it at a crazy pace. I haven't learned Ido quite yet, simply because I'm very lazy and want to learn it with my fiancee, but hell if I don't know most of the grammar already, and I learned that in about a week. I think I'll have the roots down by the time she is living with me though.

LEARN IT WITH ME TOO!!

[ProfessorPap]

i can think of some useful scenerios for a language like IDO.  even tho i agree english is de facto the international language, there are times when lack of 100% penetration could cause problems.

let's say at some point in the future there's an urgent need for a scientific expedition to take place to a remote area- let's say to study the polar icecaps on site to determine why they are melting faster.  or if a certain volcano in the canary islands started to erupt there would be an extremely urgent need to determine whether it would cause a landslide on the unstable side of the volcano*. or simply an important space mission where room was at a premium.

* because that would cause a mega-tsunami that would wipe out the east coast of the united states.  no kidding.

now, the basis for choosing the international members of such expeditions might not include common language as one of the most important factors.  there might be other considerations simply more important.  but if there was a preparation time allowed that included perhaps a five-week window, then the team could potentially solve the language problem while they were making their other preparations.  and since the mission was scientific there might be plenty of mathematical language in common also.   

it's hard to know what the future holds, but scenerios like this are a possibilty...

[Arthropod]

Well for those who are interested, here's a direct link to one of the best(and most complete) Ido courses availiable.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Sparta/6367/ --Ido Skolo.
http://www.iolairweb.co.uk/ido/idoforall.htm --Lesson audio files.

NOTE : I AM NOT THE OWNER OF THESE SITES NOR DO I CLAIM TO BE.

That's the Ido for All(or Ido Skolo) site. Notice how it's divided in 36 parts(31 lessons + 5 appendixes). As they will say in lesson 0, one lesson a day is perfectly adequate as long as you practice. In a month you could be writing and speaking quasi-fluent Ido. Isn't that crazy?

For a wordlist, I recommend Dyer's English-Ido and Ido-English at the NAIS' site(http://www.idolinguo.org/dictionaries/). Those are not complete yet, I'll ask the admin to fasten up a little

Here's what I recommend for learning any new language :

-READ ALOUD. When I mean aloud, I don't mean muttering, just suppose you're talking to your guardian angel or whatever. Even in public. You'll look crazy but you'll know your stuff while they won't.

-Write! Practice! Ido, like any language, can be used to write poesy, short stories, comics, heck, even novels. Just write alot, and you'll become fluent in no time at all.

-Post on the NAIS "En Ido(In Ido, but that was easily guassable)" board(http://www.idolinguo.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=2&sid=f581127a60a24fb6468a6121adc0f091). Even if you aren't a member of the NAIS, just register! The community posting in Ido is kinda active and we always appreciate seeing new faces around(that way we know we did our job  :happy:). We're always willing to help newcomers!

I'm gonna copy someone off the NAIS board and end with :

Salutati amikala!

[Ybom]

I sux at dhtml/css or whatever, but I am reformatting Ido Skolo if the text without any form of clicky nav burns your eyes. The preformatted version is available for most lessons, however I have converted up through 7 already.

http://freewebtown.com/nais/ifarindex.htm