Rosalind je n'ai pas le temps pour So... what do you want to say?  Doesn't   temps in this sentence mean time ?  How would it confuse with fois ?    Rosalind Jen eble kialo por konfuzo! Kia konfuzo? Mi montras, ke la sama vorto en la franca ne havas la saman signifon, kiun vi donis.  Do konfuzo.

Jens == Jens S Larsen < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it writes:    Jens [...]    Jens That's why many language teaching    Jens methods exclude formal grammar; living languages should be    Jens learned through imitation of proficient speakers, they say.    Jens The reason that this approach has had less success in    Jens Esperanto teaching is that proficient speakers can be hard    Jens to come by in many places on the earth, In that case, what's  the use of being able  to converse in Esperanto? Too few people can do it! Where are you going to find proficient speakers of English in China?  In all too few parts of that country.  There are very few proficient speakers of any language who do not waste time speaking broken, heavily accented English which I find difficult to understand. <cut .. cut

Jens == Jens S Larsen < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it writes:     Jens [...]     Jens That's why many language teaching     Jens methods exclude formal grammar; living languages should be     Jens learned through imitation of proficient speakers, they say.     Jens The reason that this approach has had less success in     Jens Esperanto teaching is that proficient speakers can be hard     Jens to come by in many places on the earth, In that case, what's  the use of being able  to converse in Esperanto? Too few people can do it!     How would parameter be a better word?  (In other words, why     is argument worse than parameter , given they are both     unambiguous in their own contexts.)     Jens It would be better by being known in advance

Jens == Jens S Larsen < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it writes: In that case, what's  the use of being able  to converse in Esperanto? Too few people can do it! I think you mean few

Rosalind == Rosalind Walter < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it writes:    Rosalind Where are you going to find proficient speakers of    Rosalind English in China?   Everywhere.  In every city of  a certain size  or larger, you can find such speakers. True enough. They are usually behind hotel counters, asking for money or having you fill out forms for the Security Bureau (Secret Police). Even the waiters in the big tourist hotels also speak English, or so they claim on their resumes. All the ones I met, however, had forgotten most of it after they filled out the resumes. In my experience, don't count on English-speaking (a) doctors and (b) Friendship Store clerks. I ran into doctors twice. The first one, a staff doctor in the Jinling Hotel clinic (and my best friend's sister) spoke about a hundred words of English, none of them very useful. (The patient spoke only Finnish, Esperanto and French...) The second batch, at a hospital in Nanjing, didn't have an English-speaker among them, though they had some very nice English-language calendars on the hospital wall; the only person I met in that hospital who spoke English at all was an Italian gentleman, who knew enough to try and bum a cigarette from me (fruitlessly; I don't smoke). As a rich (!!) foreigner, I got dragged into the Friendship Store in Shanghai, where I met not one clerk who could speak English. One enthusiastic young lady who had taken English in college (as a student of my friend!) kept an encyclopedia-sized notebook, almost full, in which she noted every new English word she heard with a definition in Chinese; however, if you wanted to talk with her (and if I'd been a bit younger, and unmarried, I certainly would have!), you needed an interpreter. I was invited to give three talks in Shanghai, two of them in Esperanto and one (on a more technical subject) in English. The two in Esperanto were given in a large hall. Nobody counted the house, though someone later WAGged a figure of about two hundred persons in attendance