Category: instruado
The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) will hold its annual convention in San Diego on November 20-22, 2009. Mar? ;-)
Brian Kaneen ĵus informis min pri tio. Estas jam tro malfrue por proponi programeron, sed eble ankoraŭ eblus mendi ekspozician tablon (700 USD).
Haruo
D. Gary Grady is Vice President of the American Association of Teachers of Esperanto (AATE). He lives in Durham, NC.
dgary cxe mindspring punkto com
At some point after we start learning Esperanto, we begin to notice things that make the language seem harder than it needs to be. For example:
Ni komencis la kunvenon, kaj la kunveno komenciĝis.
Mi boligis la akvon, kaj la akvo bolis.
Why say komenci in one place and komenciĝi in the other? And why does boli work differently?
The usual explanation is that komenci is transitive and boli is intransitive, and to use komenci intransitively or boli transitively requires a suffix. Even if students remember what “transitive” and “intransitive” mean, they’re left with the impression that the transitivity of Esperanto verbs is something like the gender of French nouns: a more or less arbitrary attribute that unfortunately has to be looked up in a dictionary and committed to memory.
And Esperanto is supposed to be easy?
D. Gary Grady is Vice President of the American Association of Teachers of Esperanto (AATE). He lives in Durham, NC.
dgary cxe mindspring punkto com
When I was in college I let myself be talked into jumping directly into an upper level course in conversational French. Once I realized that everyone else in the class was much more fluent, I barely spoke at all for fear of making embarrassing mistakes.
But then some years after college I met someone who was learning French, and he and I had no trouble carrying on a limited conversation in French (with some English and a fair number of hand gestures mixed in). I’m sure a real French speaker would have been horrified, but we had a grand time and managed to communicate pretty well.
D. Gary Grady is Vice President of the American Association of Teachers of Esperanto (AATE). He lives in Durham, NC.
dgary cxe mindspring punkto com
Building up a vocabulary is a major part of mastering a language—quite possibly the major part in terms of time and effort expended. So it’s worth trying to find the best and most efficient way to teach (and learn) new words, ideally so they’ll be remembered weeks, months or years later.
Let’s try an experiment. I’m going to pick a couple of relatively uncommon Esperanto words you might not know and ask you to keep them in mind: boaco (reindeer) and luko (skylight, porthole). If you already happen to know those words, pick a couple of others at random.
Sometimes a word is so similar to its English equivalent that learning is no effort (provided it really does mean the same thing as its equivalent and isn’t a “false friend”). Other times there’s a mnemonic trick you can use. Montagu Butler suggests a number of them in his classic Step by Step in Esperanto (“A bee! Lo!” for abelo, for example.) But for the most part we have to rely on plain old memory.
D. Gary Grady is Vice President of the American Association of Teachers of Esperanto (AATE). He lives in Durham, NC.
dgary cxe mindspring punkto com
At meetings of clubs, civic groups, and churches, at science fiction conventions, in fact any time organizers have a need for talks and presentations to entertain and inform their members, you have an opportunity to introduce Esperanto.
A common approach is to give a talk about Esperanto—what it is, why to learn it, and so on—but an interesting alternative is to dive right into teaching the language. Dennis Keefe’s article in the latest issue of Internacia Pedagogia Revuo* makes some useful suggestions for doing this.
In designing a one-session micro-course it’s important to take into account the varying interest levels of your audience and the fact that they haven't (yet) signed up for Lesson Two. Ideally, the lesson should be as fun and entertaining as possible, bearing in mind the likely diversity of participants. It helps to cover a number of topics: a little about pronunciation, a little about grammar, a few useful phrases, etc.
Eble kontraŭ prudento, mi ĵus aranĝis instrui Esperanto-kurseton per programo de la studenta Unio ĉe mia loka universitato. Mi ne fakas pri Esperanto-instruado, sed mi volas kuraĝigi lokajn personojn lerni la lingvon mem kaj pri ĝia interesa historio. Por reklami la kurson, oni bezonas allogan priskribon de la kurseto. Mi jam proponis la jenan tekston, sed mi nun petas helpon plibonigi ĝin aŭ jeson de tio, ke ĝi sufiĉas por la celo. Bonvolu memori tion, ke mi loĝas en la progesema urbo Madison, WI. Dankon pro viaj sugestoj!
