mi learnas esperanto

This is the year Evangeline decided to break all our brains.

In order to keep the children's brains from atrophying during the summer, I like to have them pick a research project or other academic sort of goal that they can work on, in addition to any new math concepts that we study and the standard reading goals.

This summer, Evangeline decided she wanted to learn a new language. We live in a part of Iowa with a heavy Hispanic population, but she didn't want to bolster her Spanish skills. I speak Haitian Creole, though not fluently, but she didn't want to learn that. She chose instead to learn Esperanto, that most famous of invented languages, which none of us speaks.

Esperanto is designed for ease of learning: There are no irregular verbs or nouns, spelling is a cinch once you grasp the language's flavor, and even the vocabulary is fairly accessible for an English-speaker, since it draws principally from European roots. If you speak a European language, the language is supposed to be a snap.

Additionally, studies have shown that studying Esperanto makes it easier to master other second languages. Many years ago in Britain, a school taught German to a control group for four years, and Esperanto to another group for one year, followed by German for three years. At the end of the road, the second group had a much stronger mastery of German than the control group.

Another incentive for learning Esperanto is that it is politically and culturally neutral; that is, you can speak Esperanto with someone from China, and you don't need to worry about sounding like an idiot, because it's a native language for neither of you. The words aren't laden with political significance because of one piece of history or culture; it's effectively a common middle ground.

I can vouch for how easy it is to learn, myself. At the end of the first lesson, I already could conjugate verbs into past, present and future tenses, and inflect nouns into nominative and accusative cases. The only barriers to communication were that I had to stop and recall the vocabulary as I spoke (as did Evangeline as she listened), and that because of the nature of the vocabulary list in Lesson One, all we could talk about was bread, cake, coffee and tea.

Lesson Two, which I've sneaked a peek at, includes information on adjectives and personal pronouns. Some auxiliary information in another flier also introduced numbers and colors. The language is so easy that, as Evangeline pointed out, we can now count just up to 1,000,000, even though we've been studying the language for less than a month.

In fact, I see two chief difficulties. First is that no one around here speaks Esperanto, that we know of. And second ...

As I said, we live in an area with a lot of Spanish speakers. Many signs and notices are bilingual. And I've been trying to teach Evangeline and Rachel how to speak Creole. The result is that I already speak to them in a medley of three languages -- English, Spanish and Creole.

Add Esperanto to this mix, and I have visions of the girls learning four languages, and being able to separate none of them.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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thor's busy tonight

Lots of lightning flashing over Nova Bastille, with thunder rolling across the rooftops.

No rain, though. The painful heat wave concludes its second day tonight, with only tantalizing intimations of relief. The actual rain isn't on the books until Wednesday, if we're lucky and get the requisite 50 roll on our percentile dice.

Stupid thunder god. If he really wanted to impress us, he'd send rain instead of beating giants about the head with his little hammer.

Keeping the kid's brain engaged during the summer shutdown

Evangeline last week received recognition from the Nova Bastille Free Public Library that she is a skilled writer.

As part of its summer program, the library solicited essays from city children on the subject of how to take their pets with them on a trip to colonize the moon. Essays had to show an understanding of a pet's needs, and ways that a zero-gravity environment would differ from the Earth.

I helped her engage her thought processes, but Evangeline on her own wrote how her dog Sandy could eat, drink, sleep, exercise and go to the bathroom in space. (She neglected to mention that Sandy died last year.)

Her innovations: a food dish with a small hole so the food gets out in small amounts only, a dog-size water bottle, a cage with heavy padding so Sandy doesn't get hurt when she floats during her sleep, magnetic shoes so she sticks to the floor, and a vacuum cleaner to clean up everything.

As a sci-fi sort, I was proud that she suggested saving Sandy's waste to terraform the lunar soil -- and even prouder as an organic gardener that she stipulated the waste was not for soil where crops are raised.

But as an award-winning writer, I was prouder still that she received recognition for her own writing. Just shy of second grade, she wrote a better essay than I was accustomed to getting from many of my seventh- and eighth-graders for much of the school year back when I was a teacher.

In other education and learning news, Evangeline also has been busy reading reams of poetry by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and a few others, including some poems from my Norton Anthology of English Literature, such as Lewis Carroll and even William Shakespeare. She's been learning folk songs and mastering the rest of the multiplication table.

She's also been learning to ride a bike (with training wheels), play baseball, and jump rope.

Her theology continues to develop, as she notices disparities between her own experiences with God and the way the Bible depicts other people's experiences.

On Saturday night she asked me if God speaks to people like he did in the Tanakh, and when I explained that the direct quotes in the Bible most likely are a literary device intended to represent the more standard prayer experience of hearing God speak to our hearts, she asked me how we can recognize when he's talking to us and when we're just imagining it. She also wanted to know if I had ever heard God speak out loud.

That was the night we read the chapter in 2 Samuel where David decides he wants to build God a Temple instead of leaving the Ark of the Covenant inside a tent all the time. I tried to explain, without getting into the priesthood of Melchizedek or anything deep like that, that the Temple system was a shadow of what was to come in Christ, when the Holy Spirit would live in our hearts. And that prompted her to ask when the Holy Spirit comes into people, if tongues of fire still appeared on their heads when he did and so on.

I think she's intrigued by the admittedly dramatic image of people with flames dancing on their heads, speaking in unknown tongues, and she wanted to know if I had ever seen that happen. (Nope. Not even in the Assemblies of God.)

So I had to explain not only about biblical inspiration, but about the Abramic covenant and Mosaic law being forerunners and types of the relationship we now have with God in Christ, the difference between the indwelling and baptism of the Holy Spirit, and then I had to note that the day of Pentecost was the only time in the Bible when tongues of fire appeared on people's heads as they began to speak in tongues. (And she amazed me with the amount of detail she remembered about that story, that the Christians were speaking all sorts of languages they didn't know but everyone else did, that people thought they were drunk or crazy, and that thousands of people became Christians as a result.)

I can only imagine how late we would have been up if I had started talking about Melchizedek. (And let me note that when we read that chapter of Genesis a few weeks ago, she noticed that Melchizedek and Abram ate the same stuff that we use to celebrate the Last Supper.)

I love it when she asks these questions, because it jolts me out of my own complacency, and forces me to rethink some of my own suppositions about God. How do we know when it's really God speaking to us, and we're not just imagining it? If God's quotes in the Bible are a literary device, what other things could be literary devices that I'm not recognizing as such? As is usual, she left me with weighty questions to ponder while I left her to consider my own inadequate answer to her question.

And lastly, Evangeline is asking for a little brother. She is not just asking us, I have heard her asking for one during bedtime prayers.

Balloonmania at the public library

We just got back from a library event where Evangeline was happily occupied for about one-and-a-half hours, learning to tie her own balloons, along with about 25 other screaming children. (The only downside was when the balloon lady made only one Spider-Man balloon and didn't have time to make them for other children.)

Rachel and I stayed out in the children's section of the library and played with dolls, did puzzles and read a couple books. About 20 minutes before the balloon class ended, the librarian asked if Rachel would be interested in coloring a dragon scale for some sort of thematic display they have. She gave me a dragon scale too, because they really needed to get all the scales colored and illustrated, and all the children were busy with the balloons.

So for the next 20 minutes or so, I drew pictures of Violet and the other Incredibles, Superman, Spider-Man, Batman and Green Lantern. And of course I helped Rachel draw pictures on her scale too.

Still, it was kind of fun. I looked around for the finished collection of dragon scales when we left, to see if I could spot our artwork, but no look. Maybe when we go back.

summer frost

Now that July is here, I've decided it's time to break out my sweatshirts and other heavy clothing. I'm worried about getting frostbite.

This might seem odd, considering that the temperature for the past week has rarely dipped below 100 degrees, but I stand by my statement. For some reason, Americans have a fascination with air conditioning that drives us to get the temperature inside as cold as it is hot outside.

Maybe I don't mind the heat so much because I grew up without air conditioning. Maybe my blood is still thin from living in Haiti from 1992 to 1993. Or maybe everyone else has thyroid problems.

I just don't understand why we feel the need to freeze ourselves during the hottest season of the year. Humanity lived without air conditioning or fans for at least five years before they were invented. At least 3 percent of the world survives without those things today, even in the tropics, but you would never know it by visiting most public places around here.

The advantages to over-air conditioning are pretty clear for restaurants, since they can increase their freezer space by the size of the dining room, but it still boggles my mind.

One restaurant Natasha and I visited awhile ago had the air conditioning turned up full-blast before the season's heat had even begun in earnest. It might have been 80 degrees outside, warm enough to wear shorts, but not necessarily warm enough to go shirtless.

Inside, it was so cold that the hair on my arms and legs stood on end. I shivered uncontrollably. Hanging on the wall next to me was a frozen side of beef.

"Could you turn the air conditioning down?" I asked the waiter when he came to get our drink orders. I had to repeat myself twice because my teeth were chattering. "It's freezing in here."

The waiter looked down his nose at me, out of a fur-lined parka that looked like it had once been an Arctic seal.

"You're the only who thinks so," he said coldly. His breath misted in the air in front of him.

"Fine," I snapped, wondering if it would be bad form to chop the table up for firewood. "Leave it alone. But bring me a cup of hot chocolate."

Natasha grew up in the desert, so she's usually even more affected by the cold than I. This spring, when everyone else in our church was wearing shorts and light shirts, Natasha was still wearing her long johns under her jeans, and had a T-shirt and a flannel shirt under a heavy sweatshirt she's had since college.

"I have a high surface area-to-volume ratio," is her most common defense.

The members of our church have been running a pool since April on when Natasha finally would be hot and come to church in shorts and a T-shirt. Now that she's five months pregnant, Natasha finally did just that, much to the delight of the elderly woman who won the pool, which passed the $5,000 mark in late June.

Natasha impressed even me with how hot she's been feeling lately. When we moved into our new house, the previous owner told me he was leaving behind a some functional air conditioning units in the basement.

Since air conditioning units are great at driving up the electric bill, I figured at the time that we wouldn't use them.

Wrong. Last week Natasha said she'd really like to have one in the bedroom so she can sleep. Who am I to tell her no?

At least we got some extra freezer space out of the deal.