Talk:Propaedeutic value of Esperanto

Possible copyright violation
It appears that a large part of this article was copied from International Language (known as Esperanto) Commission, Interministerial Decree April 29/October 5 1993. I don't see a copyright notice, and it was apparently published by an Italian government ministry, so maybe it's public domain or free to use; but we need to verify that. --Jim Henry 22:17, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I have emailed the webmaster of www.internacialingvo.org, where I found the source document, asking for information. --Jim Henry | Talk 22:33, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Got email on 6 March from Giorgio Pagano, the webmaster of www.internacialingvo.org, saying he would look into the copyright status of the source document. --68.158.50.57 00:05, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC) i.e. Jim Henry | Talk (having trouble logging in on this machine, maybe cookie setup problem)

Still no further word on whether the document is free to use. --Jim Henry | Talk 18:58, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Another possible source
Chuck SMITH has a user subpage, User:Chuck_Smith/Pedagogical_evidence_for_Esperanto which we might can use as an additional source if we have to rewrite this article. --Jim Henry | Talk 18:58, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Propaedeutic value of [insert other language here?]
In discussing this issue with others, the question arose whether the factors cited are propaedeutic effects of Esperanto, or propaedeutic effects of learning any other language. That is, if you have a first language, then study a second language for a year, and then study a third language, perhaps the third language always goes easier than if you had never studied the second language.

Have people done these Propaedeutic studies with languages other than Esperanto? For example, compare these two groups:
 * English (native) > French (secondary language studied for 1 year) > Japanese (third language studied for 3 years)
 * English (native) > Esperanto (secondary language studied for 1 year) > Japanese (third language studied for 3 years)

Has this been done?

If so, it seems like this article should cite them.

If not, it seems like this article should explore that explanation as a possibility and note that these were NON-controlled studies on the axis of which language is taught first.

Garkbit 15:26, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
 * https://www.angelfire.com/ok/andreo/ekparoli.report.html.
 * The EKPAROLI Project actually did this, it's just badly described in the article. They studied children learning Esperanto, Japanese, German or Indonesian in primary school and found that the Esperanto children performed better at language learning in secondary school, where the available languages were Japanese, German, French, and Indonesian.
 * SimonChris1729 17:47, 1 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Don't know, but Esp. is one of very few languages you can learn in a year of US highschool-style coursework, so I would expect the effect to be greater. (I know a few months of Esp. helped my Japanese more than 6 years of Spanish, not that I'm suggesting we use testimonials) kwami 06:18, 9 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Studies would help, but it's a pretty uncontroversial fact that study of *any* language will make the study of the third easier. This is in no way a special power that Esperanto has--as far as this goes, it's just another language.  76.93.41.50 (talk) 06:32, 18 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, there is. Esperanto will give a far greater benefit, because you can pick it up so much faster. kwami (talk) 07:37, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Of course: the more easy a first language is, the higher is the "propaedeutic factor". But there is another effect: The Esperanto grammar contains only the real important items for a language, leaves away all unnecessary complications. If you have fully understood these "few" items, you will find all these items again in the next language and will understand them there.

If you learn first one complex language and thereafter another complex one, you may have big problems to identify, which detail corresponds to which, so you have to learn and understand much from the beginning.--Hans W (talk) 20:56, 10 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Good point. Eo helped me immensely with Japanese, which is very unlike it in structure, whereas Spanish (another allegedly easy, but not nearly as easy) language was of very little use. kwami (talk) 21:07, 10 March 2010 (UTC)


 * There are other conlangs – auxlangs specifically – which are designed to be easy to learn, such as Lingua Franca Nova; shouldn't they have roughly equal propaedeutic value? Maybe even natural languages such as (certain varieties of) Malay, or pidgin and creole languages, which are probably not much harder to learn than Esperanto. So far, this article suggests to the reader that Esperanto (despite arguably not even the easiest to learn language ever) has some inherent magic property that no other language, natural or constructed, can even come close to. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:22, 9 September 2018 (UTC)


 * What specifically in the article suggests that to you? To me it seems like it takes no opinion about the value of other auxlangs. Akvadrako (talk) 23:10, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

Learning Esperanto may help with learning [insert Eastern language here?]
I noticed that Kwamikagami said "...a few months of Esp. helped my Japanese more than 6 years of Spanish..."; and on that note, while reading this article, I was thinking: The studies mentioned here were only done on European/Germanic/Romance languages. (Perhaps I'm categorizing them too narrowly/broadly — I'm not a linguist and I didn't read the article in detail.) The studies seem to show that learning Esperanto would help with learning French, German, etc., but would it help with learning Japanese? What about Tamil, Swahili, or Korean? Have studies been done on any of these languages, and/or others like them? Unless there is information to be provided in this article on African/Asian languages, the article should really be saying that learning Esperanto may help with learning "certain" foreign languages (perhaps if they all belong to one category we could replace the word "certain" with the name of that category), rather than "foreign languages" in general. Saying that it may help with learning "foreign languages" is too vague, and also misleading, because the studies mentioned article have not been done on a wide enough variety of languages to allow the use of such a general term. On the other hand, perhaps studies have been done on other various languages, and either none of our English Wikipedians know about it, or else no one has thought/known to provide that information? We should be on the look-out for studies done on the propaedeutic value of Esperanto on Asian/African languages, and put that information into this article. NoriMori (talk) 21:50, 27 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I thought there was an Australian study with Japanese, but I'm not familiar with it. But learning one foreign language helps with all, even though of course the effect is strongest with similar languages. Partly I think it's just learning how to learn a foreign language, like learning music: learning the flute will help with learning the guitar or piano, even if it helps a lot more with the oboe. That's why the recorder is so common in children's music classes: a really easy, cheap, & portable instrument that may not take the child anywhere itself, but which can lead to greater things. That's the idea behind propaedeutic Esperanto: an easy language as an introduction to and facilitator of other more practical languages. I doubt any controlled studies have been done, though. kwami (talk) 10:27, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

A source
You can find here studies with cited sources, made in Italy and otherwhere; those studies are aviable in italian, english, esperanto, french and hungarian. --Iosko (talk) 10:56, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

== Source for "Even before the experiments conducted by Prof. Helmar Frank in Germany, similar research was conducted in Hungary by I. Szerdahelyi of the University of Science in Budapest.[citation needed]" ==

I'm very certain that the source is listed here, but i can't see which one is meant. I'm not proficient enough in EO to read the article and understand it fully. http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istv%C3%A1n_Szerdahelyi — Preceding unsigned comment added by Deleet (talk • contribs) 11:08, 5 June 2012 (UTC)


 * It might be in one of his publications on Eo language instruction, but is not covered in that article. — kwami (talk) 18:49, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

Bias check
Is this article incredibly biased, or have we determined that you absolutely should learn Esperanto before anything else? I understand so-called "fair and balanced" (or NPOV) writing try to portray two unequally-weighted points as even (for example, giving equal weight to arguments for and against genetic racial superiority simply because arguments exist on both sides), and we shouldn't emphasize weak evidence to make an article feel balanced; instead, we should point out any dissent, and how much support that dissent has. If its scientific support is weak, then the article shows that it takes a particular position not because of bias, but because current evidence suggests that position. --John Moser (talk) 02:14, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

It would be great to include all the studies showing that Esperanto isn't a useful first step to learning another language. Unfortunately, I don't think there are any. Akvadrako (talk) 12:54, 25 July 2017 (UTC)

Pedagogic experiments (quicker learning of Esperanto)
The list of experiments contained some which did not really explore the propaedeutic value of Esperanto, but if and how much Esperanto can be learned quicker. So I put them into a new section. But the fact that Esperanto is quicker to learn is not well located here, in the propaedeutic value of Esperanto. Where should it go? The main article Esperanto does not mention this extensively. Is there a special article about this subject? Should we create it? --Lu Wunsch-Rolshoven (talk) 10:21, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Move to delete this article
This article cites very few sources, most of which are personal websites and not reliable sources. Of the eight references listed, only three seem reliable. One is the study published by the Italian ministry of public instruction. However, it only references studies that were neither government-sponsored nor peer-reviewed. Also, I'm skeptical that it was actually published by the Italian government, because I haven't found an Italian language version of it. The other two do seem to actually be peer-reviewed articles, but they are both written by the same person in the same journal (Helen Eaton in The Modern Language Journal). The one published in 1927, "The Educational Value of an Artificial Language", is just an essay about what propedeutic benefits might exist, concluding based on "expressions of opinion of people who have taught Esperanto over varying periods of time" that "there is enough evidence to warrant experimentation", admitting that the experiments that had been conducted were "not far enough advanced to afford actual proof of any sort." The other, published in 1934, presumably includes the results of said experiments, but I unfortunately can't find an accessible full text. Nevertheless, even if that paper contains compelling proof that Esperanto has propedeutic value, one paper is not enough of a basis for an entire Wikipedia article, as per WP:N, WP:FRINGE, and WP:ONESOURCE.

This cannot really be remedied, since -- as others have touched on in other sections on this talk page -- this topic is woefully underresearched. I looked and couldn't find any peer-reviewed studies on this topic at all. Among the non-peer-reviewed studies that exist, none investigate the propedeutic properties of languages other than Esperanto, the propedeutic value for adults, or the propedeutic value for learners of non-European languages. also, all of them are conducted by Esperanto advocates.

therefore, on the basis of WP:N, it seems to me that this article needs to be deleted. All of its sources are either broken links, unreliable, or inconclusive, possibly save one. It may deserve a paragraph on the Esperanto page, but an entire article is unjustified. Frankly, it seems to me that this whole concept of the propedeutic value of Esperanto is just pseudoscience. It strikes me as greatly unlikely that, if Esperanto actually has propedeutic value, no one has published a single study on it in a reputable scientific journal since World War II.

I'm not brave enough to formally propose deletion without posing it to the talk page first, but I am going to go ahead and add the tag now that I've explained my reasoning, since the tag takes 7 days to take effect anyway. Does anyone disagree with this assessment?

Justin Kunimune (talk) 15:54, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Perhaps this could be merged with Paderborn_method, which is effectively the same topic with somewhat different sources?
 * Both articles inexplicably lack reference to one of the most famous peer-reviewed studies on the subject, Williams, N. (1965) 'A language teaching experiment' (https://utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/cmlr.22.1.26), which supposedly showed that Esperanto accelerated the learning of French. Unfortunately, I cannot find a full version anywhere.
 * SimonChris1729 (talk) 19:57, 4 February 2022 (UTC)


 * Hm, maybe. Since that page already has Eaton's paper and the Italian Ministry of Instruction report in its bibliography, I don't immediately see anything this page has that that one doesn't.  So either way, I think this one should be deleted.  I'll see if I can find a copy of Williams's paper and see if it makes sense to add that to the Paderborn_method page.  Justin Kunimune (talk) 02:49, 5 February 2022 (UTC)


 * I concur with the deletion. Regardless of sourcing, an encyclopedia article should not consist of detailed descriptions of individual studies. Anything worthwhile can be moved to Paderborn_method or Esperanto (the latter already references the William's paper). SimonChris1729 (talk) 13:58, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Redirect instead of delete
I have contested the deletion of this article, and instead turned it into a redirect to. Since it is unlikely that this subject will ever warrant its own article, I will close & summarize all previous discussions all discussions related to the article (but not those related to the topic itself and to the sources) and dump all the sources used in the last, pre-redirect version of this article (along with a link to that version) here — in essence, "wrap it up" so that any information not already included in these articles can be integrated into  and Paderborn method. TucanHolmes (talk) 11:21, 17 February 2022 (UTC); edited 16:51, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Source dump
Here is a dump of all the sources found in version 1070139244 of this article (5 February 2022‎) and on this talk page:

Talk page
A list of the sources and pages mentioned on this talk page, along with a link to the relevant talk page section:
 * User:Chuck Smith/Pedagogical evidence for Esperanto
 * https://www.angelfire.com/ok/andreo/ekparoli.report.html (Another version of the Ekparoli project report; )
 * http://www.internacialingvo.org/public/126_plena.htm, archived from the original on 26 July 2011 (A directory of different language versions of the study performed under the auspices of the Italian Ministry of Public Education; )

Potentially missing sources

 * See
 * See
 * See