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A beginners guide to Esperanto (2003)
- _vbnz 4y agoMi parolas Esperanton kaj mi rekomendas uzu la librojn Teach Yourself Esperanto kaj la novajn Enjoy Esperanto kaj Complete Esperanto de Tim Owen, kaj na Lernu.net kaj Duolingo.
- plumeria 4y agoDankon, mi estas komencanto.
- rinnan 4y agoDankon, mi ne konsciis pri Enjoy Esperanto.
- elevaet 4y agoCool. That's readable if you know a bit of some romance languages. I'm guessing purely english speakers could make sense of it as well.
- nivenkos 4y agoInterlingua is even better for the Romance mutual intelligibility. Esperanto has a lot of Slavic and Germanic influence too.
- leke 4y agoMi plej sxatas "Esperano per 501 vortoj" https://m.facebook.com/groups/librejo/posts/1625529420896186/ https://m.facebook.com/groups/librejo/posts/1625529420896186...
- buggythebug 4y agowhat a waste of time to learn a language that has no use
- panxyh 4y agoThe language really is as easy to adapt as advertised. Too bad it got clamped, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it suddently resurfaced among youth as some koombayah meme.
- sshine 4y agoI think it’ll continue to be this undying language that done people perpetually pick up. Takes 3-6 months to learn fluently, and a lifetime to find other speakers. ;-) Maybe in the next 100 years, some neo hippie collective of a not insignificant size decides to make it the preferred language of their community. It’d be cool to walk into a part of a city where Esperanto is the norm, like Chinatown or the Jewish neighbourhood.
- runarberg 4y agoI think every 10th comment I make on HN is arguing against the notion that technology will fix the problem. But I think now I’m gonna do the opposite. It seems like technology is indeed well on its way of making the need of an international auxiliary language obsolete. For government functions live translation is something skilled translators can do pretty easily, and for common folks, live machine translations is getting better and more accessible. I for example read many tweets written in languages I don’t understand. And I think it is only a matter of time before other social platforms (including GitHub and HN) catches on to provide accessible translation tools so people can read and write in their native language, and have machines translate for them. As for communicating face to face, surely there could be a device (or more likely a phone app) that does that, but mostly I think people will just continue to learn an auxiliary language or two and find a common language to communicate in, only using the translation app as a backup in emergencies.
- nsilvestri 4y agoAnecdata, but I've met a whole two other Esperanto speakers (that I know of) in the wild since I began learning it a couple years ago! It's not prominent with the general population, but I do think there are certain types of people whom are more inclined to learn it.
- creativeembassy 4y agoIf anyone else is interested in learning it, I'm getting back into it via Duolingo and that's working well for me so far.
- sshine 4y agoMi opinias ke lernu.net estas bona hejmpaĝo por lerni Esperanton.
- ASalazarMX 4y agoMy first experience with Esperanto left me disillusioned because it looked silly. It tries to be universal by becoming a Frankenstein monster of the most popular languages. And the diacritics, it could have taken the opportunity to reduce them to the minimum indispensable, but no. Page = paĝo for some weird reason. I've always wanted to learn Loglan/Lojban because of that, but those are even more niche.
- flipcoder 4y agoI set up my keyboard so I can type the additional letters with the right alt key. There are keyboard layout options for Windows, Mac, and Linux as well as mobile keyboards. For example: Right alt + c = ĉ For linux its pretty simple, you just have to use: setxkbmap -layout us -variant altgr-intl -option esperanto:qwerty
- lcall 4y agoOr one can just use the simple internet tradition that a letter followed by an x is as if it had the caret on it. For example, instead of ĉ just writing cx.
- plumeria 4y agoIf you use iOS you can download the Esperanto keyboard (Esperanta Klavaro) [0] [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/esperanta-klavaro/id957192189 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/esperanta-klavaro/id957192189
- pixelpoet 4y agoMaybe they could do a guide on English apostrophes next.
- Cyberdog 4y agoI don't understand why someone would learn something like Esperanto when they can put that time and effort into learning a language that people actually use in the real world instead. Now excuse me as I go back to making a Snake clone in Zig.
- AussieWog93 4y agoTo be fair, if you're a native English speaker learning a second language, you'll probably get just as much out of learning Esperanto as you would German or French or Indonesian. At the end of the day, it's a hobby.
- maw 4y agoThose languages have extensive literatures which you could read in the original. Esperanto doesn't.
- runarberg 4y agoIt is unfair to say that Esperanto doesn’t have original literature. There is extensive poetry, music, fiction, and even movies which are written in Esperanto. For example, one of my favorite authors Þorbergur Þórðarson (a legend in Iceland) wrote some of his work in Esperanto (which I’ve actually never read).
- maw 4y agoI know it does, but is it comparable to what you get access to if you learn French or German or Indonesian?
- runarberg 4y agoNot at all. But there are culturally rich languages with even fewer speakers then Esperanto, and people still learn them. Consider for example people learning ancient Norse, so they can read the Icelandic sagas in the original, or Ancient Greek, or even Klingon or Tolkian elvish so they can understand a fictional Klingon opera or Elven poem. When you learn Esperanto you get access to a specific literature not available in Indonesian or German. That might be worth it for some people.
- flipcoder 4y agoGreat video on it if anyone wants an overview of the basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCiFMD8RNbg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCiFMD8RNbg And here's a cheat sheet: https://i.imgur.com/zMMY7CL.jpg https://i.imgur.com/zMMY7CL.jpg It's very fun to learn and I highly recommend it!
- anthk 4y agoJust learn Spanish. It's almost the same, it blended lots of words from Iberian languages and the spelling it's even more simple.
- overkalix 4y ago> It's almost the same No, it isn't > it blended lots of words from Iberian languages No, it didn't
- anthk 4y agoYes, it did. I am a native speaker. And, yes, I know a lot of borrowings from Iberian Romances, and non-Romances too.
- mlinksva 4y agoWhat are some example of borrowings from specifically _Iberian_ Romances? Not having looked into it beyond reading a bit about Esperanto's history, I'd always believed what the likes of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_etymology#Source_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_etymology#Source_lan... said that French and Italian were sources. Of course there would be many Iberian cognates. Even estas which looks very Iberian has a different source https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/esti#Esperanto https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/esti#Esperanto
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- frodetb 4y agoI got sucked into Esperanto after a year in Spain trying to learn Spanish. I was intrigued by the premise of an easy to learn, exception free language, with vocabulary that would already be somewhat familiar, and logical ways of building new words from components. After having spent a lot of time on learning it (before moving on to Latin for a couple of years, and later French), I've become more skeptical of some of the elements that drew me in to begin with. According to the comprehensible input hypothesis of language acquisition, studying grammar is not as important as the number of hours spent taking in messages that you understand in the language. So, a simple grammar is actually not so important. Of course, it will let you start immersing more quickly after less grammar study. But you might also have spent that time instead immersing with a "real" language in content that is more enjoyable and interesting (good entertainment in/translated to Esperanto is scarce) and come out of it with a useful skill with roots in the real world. (Sorry fellow Esperantists if that comes across as harsh...) Esperanto also does away with a lot of redundancies, like grammatical gender, or arbitrary groups of verbs with distinct conjugation schemes. On its surface that's a good thing. It makes it easier to memorise the rules. However, it also makes the language more fragile as a medium of communication, or less noise resistant. Grammatical gender and redundancy in syntax is very useful to a fluent speaker whose brain is familiar with all the arbitrary rules, because these things provide our brains with different checksums to rely on when parsing spoken sentences. That utility is largely why such grammatically redundant features have persisted.
- runarberg 4y agoAccusative nouns is one of my favorite things about Esperanto. My native language actually has accusative nouns (as well as dative and possessive; whereas English only has possessive). Accusative is somewhat redundant, because if you follow the subject-verb-object order which is the most common in esperanto, the noun following the verb is most likely accusative. However mandating the accusative n means that I can rearrange the sentence order and it is still understandable (which is really useful for e.g. poetry). I’ve often found my self really wishing english had accusative nouns.
- pessimizer 4y agoI really used to hate gender in (Romance) languages, but from gradually getting better at my second language (Spanish), I'm starting to see them as just a way to remember which word you were talking about (with an adjective) in languages without really strict word order. In Spanish it's redundant, you can tell the gender of 99% of words from the ending, others are Greek neuter borrows that end in 'a' and are unexpectedly masculine, and most of the remainder have an inconsistent gender that depends on which country you're from. So I'm not even sure that getting rid of gender simplifies much. Checksums are a good comparison. I am sympathetic to using 'e' endings when talking about groups or unknown people for the sake of bringing women into language parity with men, but that actually makes gender in Spanish more complicated.
- Decabytes 4y agoEsperanto has some warts like any language, but since it was created artificially, a lot of the grammar rules make more sense. It does make me wonder how much easier it would be to do natural language processing on it compared to other languages. I also wonder what a language would look like if it was designed to be easy for computers to “understand” while at the same time being easy to speak and learn
- pietroppeter 4y agoI did learn some Esperanto for a few months and one point of view that stuck with me is that Esperanto can be thought as the recorder/flute of languages. That easy instrument you learn as a kid that everybody can learn easily how to play and allows you to learn music. It is indeed a language easy to learn and which can give you trust to speak it and in general give you a fondness and confidence to learn more languages. I think it would be very nice to have kids learn of it if only as a fun “gym” for language learning. The fact that it still has a small international community where you are all more or less “equal” in terms of communication capability (all are speaking a second language) is a fascinating additional perk of the language.
- 10g1k 4y agoIt has always been a useless toy language for useless hipsters.
- digianarchist 4y agoAlso very latin-centric. I remember reading of an alternative artificial language that was easier for Chinese/Arabic speakers but I cannot recall the name.
- sstangl 4y agoI've maintained a well-used online Esperanto dictionary for several years now: https://www.tujavortaro.net https://www.tujavortaro.net. The whole dictionary is loaded client-side and a lookup is performed on each keypress. Because of the search speed, it's surprisingly fun to use this dictionary to explore the language. I'd like to see such dictionaries built for other languages too.
- ListeningPie 4y agoI haven’t this type of dictionary before, works really well even on iPhone.
- nz 4y agoDankon por cxi tio. Mi kutime uzas la vortaro cxe https://vortaro.net https://vortaro.net, kaj via vortaro estas pli rapida kaj pli ergonomia ol tiu.
- frodetb 4y agoLa ligilo tute ne malpravas. Vi vere faris _tujan_ vortaron!
- Charicure 4y agoDankon por via laboro. Mi uzas vian vortaron ĉiutage. Sendube la plej bona tradukvortaro en esperantujo.
- fortran77 4y agoWhy not learn a synthetic language with more speakers, like Klingon?
- jhbadger 4y agoThat's a silly myth based on the idea that everyone who bought a copy of The Klingon Dictionary (which includes me actually) learned Klingon. Esperanto has thousands of books written in it. You can count on one hand the number of books in Klingon.
- baby 4y agoTo anyone who are interested in constructed languages, but have always been intimidated learning one, try to learn "toki pona". It's a simple one, perhaps the simplest one, based only on 123 words. I learned it in a few days, there's a memrise course for it, and the difficulty comes mostly from figuring out how to express yourself with the limited vocabulary. It's like a puzzle every time you try to say something. It's a lot of fun!
- leke 4y agoTrue, I learned it some time ago and it was a lot of fun, but also a bit impractical as a language if your objective is to communicate accurately.
- nicolas_t 4y agoI've always loved learning new languages, I feel that learning new languages is a way to get insights into the culture that shaped the language. It's also a way to connect with the native speakers in a way that's more personal and natural than speaking a third common language. I've always stayed away from Esperanto exactly because of those reasons. Because it's an artificial language that has not had a community large enough and existed for long enough, I feel there's little culture tied to the language. There's also very few native speakers so that also nixes the other reason for me to learn a language... So, I'd rather learn Cantonese and Teochew than learn Esperanto. Even if I can almost always use a third common language (either English or Mandarin) to speak with native Cantonese and Teochew speakers. It's still worth it for the insight in the culture and for the connection one can get when trying to speak the other party's native language.
- pahbloo 4y agoThere is a specific mindset that makes someone want to learn Esperanto: curiosity, affinity for linguistics, ideals of a "world citizenship". I think this leads to a shared culture between two Esperantists, even if they are from different countries. (That's if you can find two of them.)
- zozbot234 4y agoI'm surprised that no one has linked JBR's famous "Ranto": http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html Quite appropriately, it starts with a "Bad Language" warning.
- leke 4y agoI admire the Esperanto movement and its history, but at the same time wish that it would collapse, because I believe it's holding back the very real need for an international auxiliary language. But isn't Esperanto an international auxiliary language, I hear you ask? Well it is, but not the one that people want, and that's a problem because most people look at it and say, I don't like it. Or they will learn it and say, I don't like how it sounds, or it isn't easy once you get past the basics and want to say more complex things. If I could use a programming analogy, it's like if BASIC had such a fanatical following, it drowned out all other attempts to make or promote a better programming language. So all anyone hears when they think of learning a programming language is BASIC!!! BASIC is what you need to learn to write any type of computer program! There are other programming languages, but they are all dead and people in the programming community all know BASIC. Then I look at it and think, meh, I would hate to have to use that. Or I would learn just enough to think, yeah, screw this. I don't want to continue down this road.
- wan_ala 4y agoThere is also toki pona which was made more recently. I think one of the differences between it and esperanto is that Toki Pona takes a lot less time to learn (it took me a few months).