Bassoon - another way to explain the function of an IAL

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Interesting TEDx video here on teaching Esperanto in schools in the UK and why learning and using Esperanto is only secondary to the project:



I don't want to spoil the flow of the conversation by explaining what a bassoon has to do with anything, but it's a good analogy. The speaker (Tim Morely) does an excellent job explaining the function of an IAL, making this video an excellent sample of a 'sales pitch' to emulate.

One other part of the video I like: no effort is made to make the Esperanto community look big, or to even get into the size of it at all. While it's a useful thing to know for a potential student of a language, using community size as a sales pitch just leaves one open to the counter-argument that if community is that important then just learn Natural Language X in its place. And if community size is that important then Esperanto should not have been learned in the beginning either when Volapük was much larger. Community size should only mentioned casually, in the sense that "oh by the way, if you learn this language you'll be able to use it in places such as...".

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