Estonian and Indonesian books arrive! Io continua studiar Interlingua

Well, it's Christmas time in Toyland again. My Estonian and Indonesian books have arrived. For each language I now have a textbook for self-directed study and accompanying audio recordings. This completes the set of three natural languages which I am evaluating in detail, my three finalists; the third is Afrikaans.

The original idea of this competition was to choose a natural language whose vocabulary I would then use with a different grammar to create an easy international auxiliary language (IAL). That is, a constructed language for international communication but using a ready-made vocabulary. All three of these languages have phonetic, easy spelling which makes them excellent candidates. I started evaluating 12 languages and narrowed it down to these 3.

However, Afrikaans appears so easy, and perhaps Indonesian too, that I suspect either of these languages might be practical for use as an effective, easy-to-learn lingua franca without modification. Time will tell. It is early days yet. Using a natural language with no modification is attractive since then the entire dictionary, including example phrases, can be used, not to mention all the existing teaching materials and textbooks. But presumably using a constructed grammar could yield significant benefits and advantages, so it still remains a strong possibility.

Meanwhile, Interlingua needs to prove itself to be at least equally easy to learn as these natural languages (which it appears to be, so far) and at least equally capable of precise and powerful expression (which it also appears to be, so far). This is by no means a foregone conclusion since Afrikaans appears to be almost ridiculously easy by natural-language standards and has already proven itself to be a highly capable language in the real world. And if, for example, I find learning Indonesian to be a total breeze and easier than struggling to learn the Romance-language idioms of Interlingua, then I will use Indonesian instead.

In other words, the battle is on!

On the Interlingua front, I am very pleased to have finally found a decent textbook for English-speaking students of the language. It is called Interlingua Today: A Course for Beginners by F.P.Gopsill (British Interlingua Society, 1994, ISBN 1-898017-01-8) and its accompanying Key to the lessons in the Interlingua course Interlingua Today: A Course For Beginners (ISBN 1-898017-02-6) by the same author. You can order a copy from the Book Service of the World Interlingua Union, known as Le Servicio de Libros de UMI.

If you speak English and you wish to learn Interlingua, I urge you to go directly to this course. It is by far the easiest and most effective of them all. The freely available courses are mostly terrible by comparison, so much so that they had previously made me decide not to bother learning Interlingua because it had seemed to be too difficult. Gopsill's book makes it relatively easy.

You should also buy Ingvar Stenström's Interlingua. Instrumento moderne de communication international (ISBN 978-91-977066-5-0) but only because it is a great way to learn correct pronunciation because an accompanying audio recording (a compact disc; it is sold as "Parte III, CD") can be purchased separately. The recording is excellent and the best way to learn Interlingua pronunciation; it reads aloud the texts found in the book. The book itself, unfortunately, does not teach Interlingua particularly well; the method employed by Gopsill is incomparably superior. Again, I previously abandoned Interlingua after having done several weeks of study of Stenström's book, because it appeared that Interlingua was too difficult for me to quickly learn. I was initially happy with Stenström's book because it seemed so much better than the freely available lessons on the internet, but Stenström's book alone is not enough.

Gopsill's Interlingua Today: A Course for Beginners is by comparison a complete joy which makes learning Interlingua very easy. The print quality of the book is acceptable, although not to a professional standard; it is the kind of volume that a high school might have printed for its students. But this does not matter. The content of the book is very good. Make sure you also get the separate booklet which is the key to the quizzes in the book; otherwise you will be very annoyed because the answers to the quizzes are not in the main book itself.

I am now able to learn Interlingua very well, using Gopsill's book. It also has a really excellent summary of Interlingua grammar, with some information which is not easily found elsewhere. The only small thing to beware of is that Gopsill promotes the use of some irregular verbs; this should be ignored. The recommendations of Stenström should be followed regarding the best current practices for using Interlingua (he is the authoritative source).

Just a couple of final points.

First, a word of warning to the student: to learn Interlingua to a reasonable level sufficient for basic conversation will take you about a year. To learn it to almost perfect fluency, if you work very hard and very regularly, will take you about three years. They are my estimates. Therefore, please do not misunderstand me when I say that Gopsill's book makes learning very easy. It does. But this does not mean you will somehow magically be able to speak Interlingua after a month. Learning any language takes time, time, time. The difference is that three years invested in Interlingua could make you a fluent expert, whereas three years invested in French or Chinese will only produce mediocre proficiency at best, assuming you are not actually immersed in that country. Also, three years of Interlingua, plus a little extra study to learn the differences between it and the natural Romance languages, would probably allow you to quite easily read Spanish, Portuguese and Italian with reasonable comprehension.

Second, a word of warning to the World Interlingua Union, the Union Mundial pro Interlingua (UMI). The UMI is making a huge, strategic mistake in charging money for textbooks and dictionaries without making electronic versions of those same texts available for download free of charge. It's fine to ask people to pay for printed books, and fine to raise money that way, but free, electronic versions of all these texts must be made available for easy download. Failure to do so spells certain failure for Interlingua as a language. This should be rectified immediately. Fix this now and you could soon have hundreds, and then thousands, of new Interlingua speakers worldwide. Fail to fix it, and you will have none.

It's that simple.

By the way, this makes good economic sense. The world's most popular programming language for serious enterprise use is Java. This language was released for download absolutely free of charge, along with extensive free tutorials and free libraries of code. Over the last 15 years a massive, multi-billion-dollar industry has grown around the Java language; there are said to be several million Java programmers in the world. The market for books, educational courses and consulting is vast and massive amounts of money changes hands. None of this would ever have happened if Sun Microsystems had charged, say, a mere $100 per copy of Java. How short-sighted that would have been. Promoters of constructed languages need to release their wares for free, just as is done in the open-source software industry. If the language is good, and some kind of business need exists for it, massive success will result. This has been proven again and again. Asking people to pay money in order to be able to learn a language which is not yet popular does not make sense.

Onward...