10 ms·

Today is Esperanto Book Day – why I learned it (2018)

69 points by martinrue 7y ago

wccrawford 7y ago
I started learning Esperanto for many of the same reasons on he did, but I abandoned it because I found that most of the literature is just translated from another language, usually English, or is not good. I also found that people tend to talk about 2 things in Esperanto: Politics, and Esperanto. I'm not really into either of those. And typing in Esperanto usually required some kind of IME, which I found to be tedious or annoying. I contrast this to learning Japanese, which I was much more successful at. There's tons of media that I enjoy, plus some things that were never translated that I still want to read. I was able to talk about non-political, non-language things with random people on the internet. And although I was still forced to use an IME to type it, at least there was a true reason for it. I recommend people learn a second language, but I recommend they find one that they'll either consume a lot of media in, or have a lot of people they can talk to daily and will actually use.
- clarry 7y ago
  I think people writing Esperanto will just understand you if you use the x system without IME. If you're doing something that's going to get published, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out a way to convert ASCII to the right letters. (The x system is also supported e.g. on wiktionary and tujavortaro, so it's pretty easy to get started without ever touching an IME)
  - schoen 7y ago
    > it shouldn't be too hard to figure out a way to convert ASCII to the right letters. Just a one-line sed script. $ echo 'Laux Ludoviko Zamenhof bongustas fresxa cxehxa mangxajxo kun spicoj.' | sed 's/cx/ĉ/g; s/Cx/Ĉ/g; s/gx/ĝ/g; s/Gx/Ĝ/g; s/hx/ĥ/g; s/Hx/Ĥ/g; s/jx/ĵ/g; s/Jx/Ĵ/g; s/sx/ŝ/g; s/Sx/Ŝ/g; s/ux/ŭ/g; s/Ux/Ŭ/g;' Laŭ Ludoviko Zamenhof bongustas freŝa ĉeĥa manĝaĵo kun spicoj.
- ecspike 7y ago
  Esperanto is doable without an IME. Some of the media I learned from used the x-system, appending an x where a diacritic mark was needed so ĉ becomes cx. The only problem with that is the original creator preferred a h-system (ĉ becomes ch) despite h existing in the language. Combined with the other things you mentioned like lack of original and compelling media, I dropped it and went back to French. It's a great concept but it's missing all the things that keep me hooked on a language.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  > Most of the literature is just translated from another language. And the original literature is problematic. Since the 1970s, Esperanto activists have heavily emphasized that Esperanto is just a neutral interlanguage, that it aims to allow everyone to keep their native language and let language diversity flourish. But at the same time, Esperantists are so proud of people creating cultural output in Esperanto, as opposed to expressing themselves first in their native languages and only then translating that expression into Esperanto. You are right that the literature is often not good. The problem is that as a very small community, publishing in Esperanto is either self-publishing or vanity publishing (i.e. if you have the money to pay, you can get your manuscript published, and then it gets sold by Esperanto booksellers or at congresses). There is little quality control. This isn't limited to Esperanto -- one encounters this also in natural languages whose communities of speakers are only in the thousands or low hundreds of thousands.
  - andolanra 7y ago
    I own a handful of Esperanto books, most of them translations that range in quality (e.g. a surprisingly good translation of The Hobbit that also translates both the poetry and the runes on the map, but also an abysmally bad translation of Alice in Wonderland that abandoned any attempt to preserve the wordplay) but the native-Esperanto books I do have are often endearingly clunky in a way that marks them as obviously self-published. For example, one of them regularly misprints its own title: the cover and the spine don't even agree on the name of the book!
    - sterlind 7y ago
      I have some Soviet propaganda stories which were painfully clunky, Brazilian "spiritualism" books which I'm not sure what to do with, and a State-approved history of China. In all of them, the Esperanto was quite good but the content is just so clunky. It was like Communist Bernstein Bears.
- interfixus 7y ago
  > I recommend people learn a second language, but I recommend they find one that they'll either consume a lot of media in, or have a lot of people they can talk to daily and will actually use This is, of course, exactly what many of us did, and what you daily see us doing here.
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    For us English native speakers there is no single language as compelling as English is for other Europeans. English gets you (from Denmark?) access to all of American commerce, Hollywood media, mainstream Western computing/programming, international airline language, much scientific work, an official UN language, travel to America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, UK, other former-British-colonies such as parts of India. Danish gets me travel to Denmark, and Danish media of which I can't name any authors or similar off the top of my head. Unless I had a personal family connection or interest, the benefit to me of learning Danish is much less than the benefit to you of learning English. I think the parent comment's recommendation to learn a second language is targetted more at people like me (pick one and learn something) rather than people who already have done that and are reading in their second (third, etc) language. That's also partly why I ended up at Esperanto - it avoids the problem of "well I learned Danish so I'd better travel to Denmark every holiday from now on, just to make it worth while" and the problem of "if I have to spend a decade learning a language.." by being much simpler than natural languages. It's more of an interest than a commitment.
- mikorym 7y ago
  I think the main benefit (apart from practical reasons) to learn a language is the associated translation of culture that suddenly is not removed by a degree of separation as before. You can think of it as lossless vs. lossy information transmission. If there is any translation step, then the transmission is lossy. Sometimes terribly lossy. With Esperanto... well, it's invented isn't it so at this point there is no cultural benefit. But then again, Klingon afficionados are probably culturally pretty colourful.
- dvdkon 7y ago
  I always thought "IME" was a specific name for input methods that didn't map 1-to-1 to keyboard keys (+modifiers) and required more than a new keyboard layout. Why would Esperanto require that? (Or do our definitions differ? I certainly wouldn't compare it to Japanese in that case.)
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    By your definition it doesn't require that; it only needs handling for ĉ, ĵ, ĥ, ŭ, ĝ, ŝ and uppercase versions. I think those particular combinations don't exist in any single European language, but you can get Esperanto keymaps ( https://esperanto.stackexchange.com/a/382 https://esperanto.stackexchange.com/a/382 ) But then, Dyalog APL has an IME for entering APL characters and you can do that with standard keyboard keys + modifier (e.g. alt+w for omega in the NARS2000 APL interpreter, ctrl+w in the Dyalog interpreter) - and that's "all" the Windows IME does, support for ctrl+w, but it allows you to do that in any program instead of just in the APL interpreter.
- Aardwolf 7y ago
  Imho if you design a new language it should use a simple and widely compatible script. Maybe computers did not yet exist back then, but they had typewriters, telegraph and baudot codes so it should have been known character set compatibility was an issue to take into account. They could've used combinations of two letters rather than diacritics if they needed this for diverse sounds. Especially odd that they did this while intending it to be used worldwide, yet not adapt to a common denominator script that would be available everywhere.
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    Imho if you design a new language it should use a simple and widely compatible script. Why try to constrain creativity by requiring that new things obey old ways? New things should be different, or allowed to be different, or what's the point in them at all? They could've used combinations of two letters rather than diacritics if they needed this for diverse sound "They" (Zamenhof, the original creator) did that, it exists. Twice over, as the h-system he proposed in 1888 in the first year or two of Esperanto, and as the x-system: https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-sistemo https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-sistemo and the https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-sistemo https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-sistemo The h-system doesn't stand out and risks clashing with valid uses, and makes weird combinations like Hh, but it is the "official" one; the x-system stands out and doesn't clash, so can be automatically converted by computer, but looks awful.
- masukomi 7y ago
  I find that on twitter most people speaking esperanto speak about anything BUT politics, and rarely Esperanto itself. Maybe i've just self-selected that stuff out but I certainly didn't _try_ to. I've found it quite refreshing to be an Esperantist on twitter because of how LITTLE political BS you have to deal with.
  - wccrawford 7y ago
    Perhaps the community has changed, then? I was learning about 10 years ago and almost everything I found was political or arguing about Esperanto itself. I never found anyone talking about hobbies and such, beyond basic pleasantries.
wishinghand 7y ago
Wishful thinking, but I do wish that Esperanto or Lojban has been successful in becoming a lingua franca. Ideally everyone would know the global language and whatever their local, mother tongue is, no matter how obscure. I think it’s a good solution to certain languages dying out as well as linguistic imperialism.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  L.L. Zamenhof's original dream was that other languages would eventually die out and be replaced by Esperanto or something like it. He came from a time, place, and personal perspective when "diversity" wasn't valued like it is today. (Similarly, he dabbled in creating a universal religion that adherents of other religions could compromise towards.) It wasn't until after the mid-20th century that the Esperanto movement started talking about supporting the world's minority languages, and even then not all parts of the organized movement got on board. From a sociolinguistic view, it seems likely that if Esperanto were the universal language, minority-language speakers would abandon their native languages for it in many circumstances ("domain loss") just as they do for English, French, Spanish, etc. in various parts of the world.
  - technothrasher 7y ago
    L.L. Zamenhof's original dream was that other languages would eventually die out and be replaced by Esperanto I think you're doing him a bit of a disservice here. His idea wasn't to kill other languages at all. He felt that if you only had to learn Esperanto to communicate with the rest of the world, you would, in fact, be able to spend more time enriching your own language. As he wrote in "Unua Libro": "How different would the case be, had we but two languages to learn; we should know them infinitely better, and the languages themselves would grow richer, and reach a higher degrees of perfection than is found in any of those now existing"
    - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
      The Unua Libro was written (naturally, as its title shows) early in Zamenhof’s activity. In later years, he went further and further down the path of "all humanity being one" rhetoric.
clarry 7y ago
If someone is looking for a fun introduction to Esperanto, I'd recommend checking out this VN: https://www.gog.com/game/the_expression_amrilato https://www.gog.com/game/the_expression_amrilato It's pretty short and you won't attain any sort of mastery, but I found it much more engaging than textbooks or video lessons. There's a sequel, but only in Japanese for now (and unfortunately it has DRM, unlike the first title on GOG): https://sukerasparo.net/items/5c5a985268702449498fa1e1 https://sukerasparo.net/items/5c5a985268702449498fa1e1
Rerarom 7y ago
I spent three months at the beginning of this year learning Esperanto. This is the first time I speak about it in a detailed way. My motivation was manifold: I somehow couldn't manage to learn the language of the country I was currently living in, so I wanted to try a simpler one; I was curious about Esperanto ever since I was a child; I was fed up with people learning languages because of job-related issues or infatuation with the culture (yes, they bothered me equally); I wanted to have a hobby that didn't involve my work or my friends. My path was as follows (I am writing this as general advice for a potential learner): I first did the whole Duolingo tree, working ~2 hours per day, which took me a month, then I read the novel for beginners Gerda Malaperis by Claude Piron which everyone recommends (there was only one or two words in it which I didn't already know from Duolingo), then I read for a few weeks from Piron's Vere aŭ fantazie. This is a very nice book of stories (a work of genius, I may say) which is written carefully as to start from a limited vocabulary (smaller than Gerda, since it also aims at learners which started with other texts) and then to slowly add 8-10 new words in every chapter. I read one story per day, underlining words I didn't recognize (not caring whether I had learned them before or they were actually new) and then looking them up in a dictionary. When I finished the story, I reread the sentences which contained the underlined words. Then, the next day, I reread the last day's story before embraking on a new one. This way one slowly absorbs (almost without realizing it) a whole lot of new vocabulary. I would love to see someone doing this kind of project in a non-constructed language. After finishing that book, I started reading from Boris Kolker's Vojaĝo en Esperanto-lando, usually presented as an advanced reader, one chapter a day (I think it has three-four new words per chapter), which I abandoned somewhere in the middle. At the end of it, I could read an advanced book written in Esperanto which felt enough like an achievement. I don't know about conversational skills, since I never talked to anyone. But even if I initially hated culture-related motivations, I longed for having a country and a culture to read about and apply my skills. I found the same problems that wccrawford is complaining about in another comment - almost no media produced in Esperanto got my attention. There is some stuff I like about it: it sounds very cosy (even the sentences I read on the blog post above); the fixed endings make it easy to parse a sentence even if you don't know what the words mean; it has very powerful means of enriching its own vocabulary (when I was a child, I loved English because of this, let's say in this regard English is to Esperanto as Unix is to Plan 9 with regard to the Unix philosophy, so it kinda rekindled that enthusiasm). I recommend it to anyone identifying with at least one of my motivations above.
schoen 7y ago
(2018) - previous submission at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619
- dang 7y ago
  Other Esperanto threads include 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20802326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20802326 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16014476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16014476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835090 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11765214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11765214 2015 (a bit): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10019175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10019175 2015 (a lot): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9625048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9625048
oarabbus_ 7y ago
If you're considering learning Esperanto, you should learn Chinese or Spanish instead
- chillacy 7y ago
  I think you’re getting at the usefulness of the language but I’d offer a counterpoint which is the time you’d need to invest. The FSI estimates 500 hours until Spanish proficiency and 2000 hours for mandarin. Esperanto is more like 50, and studies show faster French acquisition after first learning Esperanto than learning French the whole time.
  - dorchadas 7y ago
    There's one key flaw in those studies, at least in my opinion. It's that they were done among children who had no choice. I can't imagine that someone who was actually interested and motivated to learn French would get the benefit from Esperanto. I also don't think that the benefit is all that great, and would like to see the studies repeated now, 100-years later.
    - chillacy 7y ago
      Anecdotally I found it helpful because it trains some sort of "meta-learning" for languages. Once you learn a new language once, the next gets a little bit easier, things are less discouraging.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    > Esperanto is more like 50 Whats your standard for "proficiency" here? After 50 hours, you're not going to have a very extensive vocabulary. > studies show faster French acquisition after first learning Esperanto than learning French the whole time. Which studies? If you mean those listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant... then they don't actually support that conclusion. Some more details on one of those studies in particular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019
amflare 7y ago
Learning Esperanto is something that I really want to do, I've just never been able to stick to it. I imagine its because its has no use in my everyday life, and so I tend to brush it off in favor of other things (which admittedly I brush off as well because I'm lazy, but Esperanto prioritises behind those and so when I'm not being lazy I do the other things first and never spend enough time in Esperanto to make any progress).
- martinrue 7y ago
  Between podcasts, international friends on Facebook/Twitter, and voice chats (Telegram is good for this, as lots of Esperanto speakers use it: see https://telegramo.org https://telegramo.org) I find a way to regularly use Esperanto in my daily life. I also attend a few annual events that run for a week in which 200+ people get together and use only Esperanto, so that obviously helps a lot. When I first started learning and it was only an academic pursuit for me, I lost interest a few times. But having made a bunch of friends through the language at this point, I now use it the same way I would any other language (and Esperanto has definitely been significantly easier to reach a useful level of fluency than my efforts to learn Hebrew and German). There are a few other posts on my blog about my experiences with the language, in the event those are interesting.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  Thinking about this kind of thing recently, I'm not sure it helps to consider "learning" as a boolean state which you don't have, then you study, then you have forever more. Think of "use it or lose it" - things you don't use, from muscles to dexterity to athletic endurance to mental arithmetic - fade with time. Entropy takes your world, objects get dusty and rusty and creaky if you don't keep up maintenance, food stores rot, clothes and shoes perish, monetary value falls. The idea that we can have things for long periods of time without using them and they stay the same and ready is more difficult than it seems at first. Also think of "you are what you repeatedly do" - a language isn't something you memorize, it's something you do, something you use, and you can use it more or less regularly or intensely. Perhaps everything is like this. From considering that kind of thing, there's no level where you can learn it, then stop learning and retain it forever after. If you do stop, your memory and skill with it will fade ("I used to be able to do that!"). I imagine its because its has no use in my everyday life Not at all; lots of hobbies and interests have no everyday use but are still attention grabbing, interesting, captivating, etc. People who spend time doing crosswords probably don't do them because crossword puzzles have use in their everyday life. Most people who play instruments don't earn money or give everyday performances. Most people who read fiction probably don't think it has use. Maybe you're not lazy, and you don't really want to learn Esperanto, don't find it interesting, but have become trapped in a pattern of thought of a vague feeling that you "should" for one reason or another?; fear of missing out, or to be a good and respectable person in some way, or because it would make you more interesting, or give you an excuse to avoid a more difficult language, or uphold something you told someone you would do that one time, or any number of other not-too-convincing-when-you-look-closely reasons? 'Study' is what we have to do for things we don't care about. We have to forcibly prioritise them because otherwise lack of interest means we ignore them. Things we really take interest in, we do them. They don't need artificial studying and they don't need prioritizing, they may need other things pushed aside to make time, because they are already a priority ("I want to see what happens in this book, better make time for it").
plumeria 7y ago
A nice profile of the language can be found here: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/esperanto.html http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/esperanto.h...
- D-Coder 7y ago
  The Duolingo course is also very good. https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto
sli 7y ago
Ido is an alternative to Esperanto with similar grammar rules and pronunciation, but less complex conjugations and no need for diacritics, instead using digraphs and is thus easier to type. Ido is also gender neutral (rather, gender on nouns is optional) while Esperanto is not, which makes that part a bit easier to learn. The problem is that there are only about 1000 speakers, which is significantly less than Esperanto. And so learning resources are quite limited by comparison.

69 points by martinrue 7y ago

I started learning Esperanto for many of the same reasons on he did, but I abandoned it because I found that most of the literature is just translated from another language, usually English, or is not good. I also found that people tend to talk about 2 things in Esperanto: Politics, and Esperanto. I'm not really into either of those. And typing in Esperanto usually required some kind of IME, which I found to be tedious or annoying. I contrast this to learning Japanese, which I was much more successful at. There's tons of media that I enjoy, plus some things that were never translated that I still want to read. I was able to talk about non-political, non-language things with random people on the internet. And although I was still forced to use an IME to type it, at least there was a true reason for it. I recommend people learn a second language, but I recommend they find one that they'll either consume a lot of media in, or have a lot of people they can talk to daily and will actually use.

clarry 7y ago
I think people writing Esperanto will just understand you if you use the x system without IME. If you're doing something that's going to get published, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out a way to convert ASCII to the right letters. (The x system is also supported e.g. on wiktionary and tujavortaro, so it's pretty easy to get started without ever touching an IME)
- schoen 7y ago
  > it shouldn't be too hard to figure out a way to convert ASCII to the right letters. Just a one-line sed script. $ echo 'Laux Ludoviko Zamenhof bongustas fresxa cxehxa mangxajxo kun spicoj.' | sed 's/cx/ĉ/g; s/Cx/Ĉ/g; s/gx/ĝ/g; s/Gx/Ĝ/g; s/hx/ĥ/g; s/Hx/Ĥ/g; s/jx/ĵ/g; s/Jx/Ĵ/g; s/sx/ŝ/g; s/Sx/Ŝ/g; s/ux/ŭ/g; s/Ux/Ŭ/g;' Laŭ Ludoviko Zamenhof bongustas freŝa ĉeĥa manĝaĵo kun spicoj.
ecspike 7y ago
Esperanto is doable without an IME. Some of the media I learned from used the x-system, appending an x where a diacritic mark was needed so ĉ becomes cx. The only problem with that is the original creator preferred a h-system (ĉ becomes ch) despite h existing in the language. Combined with the other things you mentioned like lack of original and compelling media, I dropped it and went back to French. It's a great concept but it's missing all the things that keep me hooked on a language.
Mediterraneo10 7y ago
> Most of the literature is just translated from another language. And the original literature is problematic. Since the 1970s, Esperanto activists have heavily emphasized that Esperanto is just a neutral interlanguage, that it aims to allow everyone to keep their native language and let language diversity flourish. But at the same time, Esperantists are so proud of people creating cultural output in Esperanto, as opposed to expressing themselves first in their native languages and only then translating that expression into Esperanto. You are right that the literature is often not good. The problem is that as a very small community, publishing in Esperanto is either self-publishing or vanity publishing (i.e. if you have the money to pay, you can get your manuscript published, and then it gets sold by Esperanto booksellers or at congresses). There is little quality control. This isn't limited to Esperanto -- one encounters this also in natural languages whose communities of speakers are only in the thousands or low hundreds of thousands.
- andolanra 7y ago
  I own a handful of Esperanto books, most of them translations that range in quality (e.g. a surprisingly good translation of The Hobbit that also translates both the poetry and the runes on the map, but also an abysmally bad translation of Alice in Wonderland that abandoned any attempt to preserve the wordplay) but the native-Esperanto books I do have are often endearingly clunky in a way that marks them as obviously self-published. For example, one of them regularly misprints its own title: the cover and the spine don't even agree on the name of the book!
  - sterlind 7y ago
    I have some Soviet propaganda stories which were painfully clunky, Brazilian "spiritualism" books which I'm not sure what to do with, and a State-approved history of China. In all of them, the Esperanto was quite good but the content is just so clunky. It was like Communist Bernstein Bears.
interfixus 7y ago
> I recommend people learn a second language, but I recommend they find one that they'll either consume a lot of media in, or have a lot of people they can talk to daily and will actually use This is, of course, exactly what many of us did, and what you daily see us doing here.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  For us English native speakers there is no single language as compelling as English is for other Europeans. English gets you (from Denmark?) access to all of American commerce, Hollywood media, mainstream Western computing/programming, international airline language, much scientific work, an official UN language, travel to America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, UK, other former-British-colonies such as parts of India. Danish gets me travel to Denmark, and Danish media of which I can't name any authors or similar off the top of my head. Unless I had a personal family connection or interest, the benefit to me of learning Danish is much less than the benefit to you of learning English. I think the parent comment's recommendation to learn a second language is targetted more at people like me (pick one and learn something) rather than people who already have done that and are reading in their second (third, etc) language. That's also partly why I ended up at Esperanto - it avoids the problem of "well I learned Danish so I'd better travel to Denmark every holiday from now on, just to make it worth while" and the problem of "if I have to spend a decade learning a language.." by being much simpler than natural languages. It's more of an interest than a commitment.
mikorym 7y ago
I think the main benefit (apart from practical reasons) to learn a language is the associated translation of culture that suddenly is not removed by a degree of separation as before. You can think of it as lossless vs. lossy information transmission. If there is any translation step, then the transmission is lossy. Sometimes terribly lossy. With Esperanto... well, it's invented isn't it so at this point there is no cultural benefit. But then again, Klingon afficionados are probably culturally pretty colourful.
dvdkon 7y ago
I always thought "IME" was a specific name for input methods that didn't map 1-to-1 to keyboard keys (+modifiers) and required more than a new keyboard layout. Why would Esperanto require that? (Or do our definitions differ? I certainly wouldn't compare it to Japanese in that case.)
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  By your definition it doesn't require that; it only needs handling for ĉ, ĵ, ĥ, ŭ, ĝ, ŝ and uppercase versions. I think those particular combinations don't exist in any single European language, but you can get Esperanto keymaps ( https://esperanto.stackexchange.com/a/382 https://esperanto.stackexchange.com/a/382 ) But then, Dyalog APL has an IME for entering APL characters and you can do that with standard keyboard keys + modifier (e.g. alt+w for omega in the NARS2000 APL interpreter, ctrl+w in the Dyalog interpreter) - and that's "all" the Windows IME does, support for ctrl+w, but it allows you to do that in any program instead of just in the APL interpreter.
Aardwolf 7y ago
Imho if you design a new language it should use a simple and widely compatible script. Maybe computers did not yet exist back then, but they had typewriters, telegraph and baudot codes so it should have been known character set compatibility was an issue to take into account. They could've used combinations of two letters rather than diacritics if they needed this for diverse sounds. Especially odd that they did this while intending it to be used worldwide, yet not adapt to a common denominator script that would be available everywhere.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  Imho if you design a new language it should use a simple and widely compatible script. Why try to constrain creativity by requiring that new things obey old ways? New things should be different, or allowed to be different, or what's the point in them at all? They could've used combinations of two letters rather than diacritics if they needed this for diverse sound "They" (Zamenhof, the original creator) did that, it exists. Twice over, as the h-system he proposed in 1888 in the first year or two of Esperanto, and as the x-system: https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-sistemo https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-sistemo and the https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-sistemo https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-sistemo The h-system doesn't stand out and risks clashing with valid uses, and makes weird combinations like Hh, but it is the "official" one; the x-system stands out and doesn't clash, so can be automatically converted by computer, but looks awful.
masukomi 7y ago
I find that on twitter most people speaking esperanto speak about anything BUT politics, and rarely Esperanto itself. Maybe i've just self-selected that stuff out but I certainly didn't _try_ to. I've found it quite refreshing to be an Esperantist on twitter because of how LITTLE political BS you have to deal with.
- wccrawford 7y ago
  Perhaps the community has changed, then? I was learning about 10 years ago and almost everything I found was political or arguing about Esperanto itself. I never found anyone talking about hobbies and such, beyond basic pleasantries.

wishinghand 7y ago

Wishful thinking, but I do wish that Esperanto or Lojban has been successful in becoming a lingua franca. Ideally everyone would know the global language and whatever their local, mother tongue is, no matter how obscure. I think it’s a good solution to certain languages dying out as well as linguistic imperialism.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago
L.L. Zamenhof's original dream was that other languages would eventually die out and be replaced by Esperanto or something like it. He came from a time, place, and personal perspective when "diversity" wasn't valued like it is today. (Similarly, he dabbled in creating a universal religion that adherents of other religions could compromise towards.) It wasn't until after the mid-20th century that the Esperanto movement started talking about supporting the world's minority languages, and even then not all parts of the organized movement got on board. From a sociolinguistic view, it seems likely that if Esperanto were the universal language, minority-language speakers would abandon their native languages for it in many circumstances ("domain loss") just as they do for English, French, Spanish, etc. in various parts of the world.
- technothrasher 7y ago
  L.L. Zamenhof's original dream was that other languages would eventually die out and be replaced by Esperanto I think you're doing him a bit of a disservice here. His idea wasn't to kill other languages at all. He felt that if you only had to learn Esperanto to communicate with the rest of the world, you would, in fact, be able to spend more time enriching your own language. As he wrote in "Unua Libro": "How different would the case be, had we but two languages to learn; we should know them infinitely better, and the languages themselves would grow richer, and reach a higher degrees of perfection than is found in any of those now existing"
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    The Unua Libro was written (naturally, as its title shows) early in Zamenhof’s activity. In later years, he went further and further down the path of "all humanity being one" rhetoric.

clarry 7y ago

If someone is looking for a fun introduction to Esperanto, I'd recommend checking out this VN: https://www.gog.com/game/the_expression_amrilato https://www.gog.com/game/the_expression_amrilato It's pretty short and you won't attain any sort of mastery, but I found it much more engaging than textbooks or video lessons. There's a sequel, but only in Japanese for now (and unfortunately it has DRM, unlike the first title on GOG): https://sukerasparo.net/items/5c5a985268702449498fa1e1 https://sukerasparo.net/items/5c5a985268702449498fa1e1

Rerarom 7y ago

I spent three months at the beginning of this year learning Esperanto. This is the first time I speak about it in a detailed way. My motivation was manifold: I somehow couldn't manage to learn the language of the country I was currently living in, so I wanted to try a simpler one; I was curious about Esperanto ever since I was a child; I was fed up with people learning languages because of job-related issues or infatuation with the culture (yes, they bothered me equally); I wanted to have a hobby that didn't involve my work or my friends. My path was as follows (I am writing this as general advice for a potential learner): I first did the whole Duolingo tree, working ~2 hours per day, which took me a month, then I read the novel for beginners Gerda Malaperis by Claude Piron which everyone recommends (there was only one or two words in it which I didn't already know from Duolingo), then I read for a few weeks from Piron's Vere aŭ fantazie. This is a very nice book of stories (a work of genius, I may say) which is written carefully as to start from a limited vocabulary (smaller than Gerda, since it also aims at learners which started with other texts) and then to slowly add 8-10 new words in every chapter. I read one story per day, underlining words I didn't recognize (not caring whether I had learned them before or they were actually new) and then looking them up in a dictionary. When I finished the story, I reread the sentences which contained the underlined words. Then, the next day, I reread the last day's story before embraking on a new one. This way one slowly absorbs (almost without realizing it) a whole lot of new vocabulary. I would love to see someone doing this kind of project in a non-constructed language. After finishing that book, I started reading from Boris Kolker's Vojaĝo en Esperanto-lando, usually presented as an advanced reader, one chapter a day (I think it has three-four new words per chapter), which I abandoned somewhere in the middle. At the end of it, I could read an advanced book written in Esperanto which felt enough like an achievement. I don't know about conversational skills, since I never talked to anyone. But even if I initially hated culture-related motivations, I longed for having a country and a culture to read about and apply my skills. I found the same problems that wccrawford is complaining about in another comment - almost no media produced in Esperanto got my attention. There is some stuff I like about it: it sounds very cosy (even the sentences I read on the blog post above); the fixed endings make it easy to parse a sentence even if you don't know what the words mean; it has very powerful means of enriching its own vocabulary (when I was a child, I loved English because of this, let's say in this regard English is to Esperanto as Unix is to Plan 9 with regard to the Unix philosophy, so it kinda rekindled that enthusiasm). I recommend it to anyone identifying with at least one of my motivations above.

schoen 7y ago

(2018) - previous submission at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619

dang 7y ago
Other Esperanto threads include 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20802326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20802326 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16014476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16014476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835090 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11765214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11765214 2015 (a bit): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10019175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10019175 2015 (a lot): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9625048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9625048

oarabbus_ 7y ago

If you're considering learning Esperanto, you should learn Chinese or Spanish instead

chillacy 7y ago
I think you’re getting at the usefulness of the language but I’d offer a counterpoint which is the time you’d need to invest. The FSI estimates 500 hours until Spanish proficiency and 2000 hours for mandarin. Esperanto is more like 50, and studies show faster French acquisition after first learning Esperanto than learning French the whole time.
- dorchadas 7y ago
  There's one key flaw in those studies, at least in my opinion. It's that they were done among children who had no choice. I can't imagine that someone who was actually interested and motivated to learn French would get the benefit from Esperanto. I also don't think that the benefit is all that great, and would like to see the studies repeated now, 100-years later.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    Anecdotally I found it helpful because it trains some sort of "meta-learning" for languages. Once you learn a new language once, the next gets a little bit easier, things are less discouraging.
- yorwba 7y ago
  > Esperanto is more like 50 Whats your standard for "proficiency" here? After 50 hours, you're not going to have a very extensive vocabulary. > studies show faster French acquisition after first learning Esperanto than learning French the whole time. Which studies? If you mean those listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant... then they don't actually support that conclusion. Some more details on one of those studies in particular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019

amflare 7y ago

Learning Esperanto is something that I really want to do, I've just never been able to stick to it. I imagine its because its has no use in my everyday life, and so I tend to brush it off in favor of other things (which admittedly I brush off as well because I'm lazy, but Esperanto prioritises behind those and so when I'm not being lazy I do the other things first and never spend enough time in Esperanto to make any progress).

martinrue 7y ago
Between podcasts, international friends on Facebook/Twitter, and voice chats (Telegram is good for this, as lots of Esperanto speakers use it: see https://telegramo.org https://telegramo.org) I find a way to regularly use Esperanto in my daily life. I also attend a few annual events that run for a week in which 200+ people get together and use only Esperanto, so that obviously helps a lot. When I first started learning and it was only an academic pursuit for me, I lost interest a few times. But having made a bunch of friends through the language at this point, I now use it the same way I would any other language (and Esperanto has definitely been significantly easier to reach a useful level of fluency than my efforts to learn Hebrew and German). There are a few other posts on my blog about my experiences with the language, in the event those are interesting.
jodrellblank 7y ago
Thinking about this kind of thing recently, I'm not sure it helps to consider "learning" as a boolean state which you don't have, then you study, then you have forever more. Think of "use it or lose it" - things you don't use, from muscles to dexterity to athletic endurance to mental arithmetic - fade with time. Entropy takes your world, objects get dusty and rusty and creaky if you don't keep up maintenance, food stores rot, clothes and shoes perish, monetary value falls. The idea that we can have things for long periods of time without using them and they stay the same and ready is more difficult than it seems at first. Also think of "you are what you repeatedly do" - a language isn't something you memorize, it's something you do, something you use, and you can use it more or less regularly or intensely. Perhaps everything is like this. From considering that kind of thing, there's no level where you can learn it, then stop learning and retain it forever after. If you do stop, your memory and skill with it will fade ("I used to be able to do that!"). I imagine its because its has no use in my everyday life Not at all; lots of hobbies and interests have no everyday use but are still attention grabbing, interesting, captivating, etc. People who spend time doing crosswords probably don't do them because crossword puzzles have use in their everyday life. Most people who play instruments don't earn money or give everyday performances. Most people who read fiction probably don't think it has use. Maybe you're not lazy, and you don't really want to learn Esperanto, don't find it interesting, but have become trapped in a pattern of thought of a vague feeling that you "should" for one reason or another?; fear of missing out, or to be a good and respectable person in some way, or because it would make you more interesting, or give you an excuse to avoid a more difficult language, or uphold something you told someone you would do that one time, or any number of other not-too-convincing-when-you-look-closely reasons? 'Study' is what we have to do for things we don't care about. We have to forcibly prioritise them because otherwise lack of interest means we ignore them. Things we really take interest in, we do them. They don't need artificial studying and they don't need prioritizing, they may need other things pushed aside to make time, because they are already a priority ("I want to see what happens in this book, better make time for it").

plumeria 7y ago

A nice profile of the language can be found here: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/esperanto.html http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/esperanto.h...

D-Coder 7y ago
The Duolingo course is also very good. https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto

sli 7y ago

Ido is an alternative to Esperanto with similar grammar rules and pronunciation, but less complex conjugations and no need for diacritics, instead using digraphs and is thus easier to type. Ido is also gender neutral (rather, gender on nouns is optional) while Esperanto is not, which makes that part a bit easier to learn. The problem is that there are only about 1000 speakers, which is significantly less than Esperanto. And so learning resources are quite limited by comparison.