{"id":2343,"date":"2013-05-22T04:34:23","date_gmt":"2013-05-22T04:34:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/esperanto\/?p=2343"},"modified":"2013-05-22T19:47:58","modified_gmt":"2013-05-22T19:47:58","slug":"polyglot-conference-in-budapest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/esperanto\/polyglot-conference-in-budapest\/","title":{"rendered":"Polyglot Conference in Budapest"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Brian Kwong and other polyglots<\/p><\/div>\n

Greetings from Budapest! This weekend I attended the Polyglot Conference<\/a> here. There were people in attendance from all over the world, giving lectures on such varied topics as Learning endangered languages through music to How conflict management works in bilingual situations. There were also an introduction to Esperanto by Eva Fitzelov\u00e1 and the non-profit organization E@I<\/a> by Zs\u00f3fia Pataki.<\/p>\n

As those who speak Esperanto know, many of its speakers also speak many other languages. We even have an inside joke that “Esperanto speakers are people who need Esperanto the least!” Back to the conference, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that thirteen(!) of the hundred participants speak Esperanto. These include some big names from the polyglot community such as Richard Simcott of Speaking Fluently<\/a> and Judith Meyer of LearnLangs<\/a>, Benny Lewis of Fluent in Three Months<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Zs\u00f3fia Pataki speaks about E@I<\/p><\/div>\n

Benny has even written Just 2 weeks learning Esperanto can get you months ahead in your target language<\/a>, which I’d recommend sending to those critical of Esperanto’s usefulness. His basic argument is that, counterintuitively, by spending two weeks learning Esperanto, you can get miles ahead in the language you want, because it teaches you how to learn a language very quickly. I also learned of a Budapest language school<\/a>, which starts each beginner course with a quick overview of Esperanto grammar to accelerate each student’s progress in their language of choice.<\/p>\n

Besides that, Susanna Zaraysky<\/a> is currently working on a documentary of how foreign language knowledge has saved peoples’ lives. She is focusing on the Ladino language (a 500-year-old dialect of Spanish) and tells a story of a Jew from Sarajevo who escaped from a Nazi train and managed to talk with and Italian colonel with Ladino with the colonel replying in Italian. We also learned of how George Soros<\/a> escaped from Hungary by attending an Esperanto conference abroad. If you know of others whose language skills have saved their life, Susanna would like to hear from you!<\/p>\n