Speaking as an Esperantist, I've heard arguments like this over and over, from disgruntled Esperanto beginners, who half-heartedly learned portions of the langu

Speaking as an Esperantist, I've heard arguments like this over and over, from disgruntled Esperanto beginners, who half-heartedly learned portions of the language, motivated by fallacious utopian impulses, and then abandoned it completely, after deciding that it isn't "perfect" or "international enough," or "easy enough," or something else. That's naive and short-sighted. The fact of the matter remains that Esperanto is the most successful, most widely spoken international auxiliary language. It has the largest community, probably the friendliest community of any international language, and has the largest body of literature, with over 30K books published in the language, and with hundreds of new books published each year. It remains the easiest to learn, even for speakers of non-European languages. I know this because I've met tons of Chinese and Japanese Esperantists, who've all learned it after learning English, or Spanish, or Korean, and conclude that Esperanto is orders of magnitude easier and more intuitive than those languages. It's not completely logical, obviously (Lojban is probably more logical) but is incredibly logical and intuitive, compared to any natural language. It's maybe not as easy as Toki Pona, with its vocabulary of 100 or so words, but it's still pretty damn easy. I learned Esperanto in a matter of weeks, rather than years. Esperanto is not as concise as a language like Volapuk, either, but that concision comes with too many trade-offs. Sure, it's all a matter of personal taste, but if you learn Lojban or Toki Pona, or even Ido, you'll be able to speak with, at most, tens of other speakers, instead of millions, and read maybe ten books total, rather than tens of thousands in Esperanto. With Esperanto you'll be able to use operating systems like GNOME and websites like DuckDuckGo, Google, Facebook, and Mastodon, all using Esperanto. You'll be able to watch thousands of videos on sites like Tubaro and Youtube. You'll be able to follow hundreds of Twitter and Mastodon users. You'll be able to listen to thousands of Esperanto-language songs and podcast episodes. You'll be able to play games like The Expression Amrilato, and read comic books like Saga, which have Esperanto-language components. Best of all, you'll be able to travel the world with Pasporta Servo, staying for free with Esperantists along the way. There are also conferences attended by thousands of people, summer-long residential courses, and even universities which use the language. Virtually none of that stuff is available in other constructed languages. As the writer of this article himself admits, Esperanto isn't perfect. Obviously. It was never intended to be. Nor was it intended to be perfectly international, with word roots derived from all languages throughout the world, equally. Nor was it intended to be perfectly easy, or perfectly well-distributed among easy phonemes. But Esperanto is an excellent compromise between all these factors, and is a hugely enjoyable, expressive language with a large and welcoming community. The proof, for me, of its expressivity, is that so many classics of western literature, and of world literature, including much of Shakespeare's works, have been very eloquently and poetically translated into Esperanto. That's not true of any other constructed language. All natural languages evolve, and so does Esperanto. Esperanto reform and evolution has been happening since the beginning. What's absurd is the beginners, or even total non-speakers who insist on reform before even learning the language to a competent level. I think this has to do with utopian feelings. They think Esperanto should be perfect, and so when they learn enough of it to realize that there are faults, they give up on it altogether. But would anyone do that with say, German? French? It's a language. It has faults. Get over it. The difference is that Esperanto has probably 1% of the faults, irregularities, and idiosyncrasies of any other language. I'd argue that everyone should learn Esperanto. It takes virtually no time or effort, compared to learning any other language, so it's basically a language you get for free. Like pseudo-code. And the worlds it opens up for you are so immense. Rather than debate about whether Esperanto is perfect or not, just learn it. You won't regret it.