alt Hacker NewsI don't wanna preach how to raise children, but picking esperanto as a second language to teach the kids is going to be a very uphill battle.
It's not the native language of anyone, especially in the family so they are not going to be as exposed to it as one would in a family with a non- english native. And then there's no esperanto anywhere else so they are going to learn quickly they don't need it at all except for when daddy says something in esperanto.
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lIl-IIIl • today at 5:14 PM
It is a native language of a few thousand people, per the article.
Most Esperanto natives are from parents who don't speak each other's native language and use Esperanto to communicate.
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If you want to gift your children with an extra language, the real benefit is unlocking a part of the world and its culture for them.
Esperanto in this case is less of a gift to the child, and more of a self-expression of the parents’ worldview.
The author kind of acknowledges something about this.
> In Canada, it would make a lot more sense to raise the kids speaking French. If I had been more organized and forward-thinking, I could have raised them as native French speakers. I would have needed to prepare and study French but that didn’t even occur to me when Mira was born. I was fluent in English and Esperanto, I wanted Mira to be bilingual, and so I taught her Esperanto.
I don’t buy this argument. It boils down to, yes it would have been better to teach a different language, but the parent didn’t want to do the work of learning French, so the child got something that wasn’t nearly as beneficial instead. Children are capable of acquiring a second language for quite a bit longer than it takes a committed adult to become fluent in French.