Strangely enough, I feel Esperanto is more similar to smaller natural languages. My experience with Esperanto is similar to my experience with Belarusian. Alth

Strangely enough, I feel Esperanto is more similar to smaller natural languages. My experience with Esperanto is similar to my experience with Belarusian. Although my great-grandmother spoke Belarusian as her first language, this transmission was broken. My grandmother already spoke Russian to my mother, and we spoke Russian in my family. I learnt Belarusian in school and then started using it to express my Belarusian identity, to speak with a community of like-minded people. I've learnt Esperanto when I emigrated. I wanted to find friends in my new country, my new city had an Esperanto community, and this was the reason I've learnt Esperanto. This worked for me :D Like with Belarusian in Belarus, in Esperanto you don't talk everywhere. You have special times and places; outside them, you speak other languages. Like with Belarusian, you have rather limited number of books available. So, if in Russian or English I mostly read fantasy, in Belarusian and Esperanto I read a much wider variety of genres, because there's just not enough books to commit to one or two genres. So, while Esperanto didn't become an international competitor to English, it became a nice small homely language for speaking to friends. Not exactly what the Zamenhof envisioned, but still nice.