
Today is Esperanto Book Day – why I learned it (2018) - martinrue
https://martinrue.com/zamenhofa-tago-18?jaro=19
======
schoen
(2018) - previous submission at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619)

~~~
dang
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)

------
wccrawford
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.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> 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
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
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.

------
wishinghand
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.

~~~
Causality1
Esperanto has a far worse problem with linguistic imperialism than English
does. Esperanto is a hobby/philosophy for denizens of rich Western countries
to play with. English, while not being a fully neutral playing ground, is
orders of magnitude better able to connect disparate communities and give the
underprivileged greater opportunities.

~~~
StevePerkins
I am... not sure about your grasp on the term "imperialism" here.

You hail English as " _able to give the underprivileged greater opportunities_
". But the reason for that is that English is more widely spread, and dominant
in the most wealthy areas. Which is... well... imperialism.

It sounds like you're simply dismissing Esperanto as a niche hobby for a
handful of white nerds. Which, in terms of practical benefit, might well be
accurate. But it is BIZARRE to invert the definition of imperialism to over-
state this point.

------
clarry
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)

------
sli
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.

------
amflare
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
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.

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

~~~
D-Coder
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)

------
Rerarom
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.

~~~
wenc
> I was fed up with people learning languages because of job-related issues or
> infatuation with the culture (yes, they bothered me equally);

I'm curious why you feel this way (no judgment, genuinely curious).

~~~
Rerarom
Well it was a strongly irrational feeling so it's hard to properly justify but
let's say I sensed a kind of arbitrariness in both types of reasons and I was
looking for stuff that was more objective. (An example of how our minds loop
from rationality to irrationality without settling on either.)

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

~~~
chillacy
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.

~~~
nilkn
If learning Esperanto really solved the same problem that learning, say,
Spanish or Mandarin would solve, then you might have a point. But Mandarin has
just under a billion native speakers and another 200 million second language
speakers, whereas Esperanto has as few as 63k speakers combined from both
categories. The combined number for Spanish is easily 500+ million.

The only compelling argument I see is the one you mentioned about using
Esperanto as a quick path to, say, French. However, if we use your Spanish
numbers, it'd need to reduce Spanish acquisition time from 500 hours down to
at most 450 in order for it to be a net gain. Personally, as someone who's
studied Spanish as a second language, I just can't imagine it would have
helped me going through Esperanto first.

~~~
jodrellblank
How long are you planning on living? 63,000 people is chatting to one person
per day for 172 years, assuming no new people learn it in that time and you
never speak to the same person again.

It's a stretch to say every one of them would want to chat with you and you
with them, but by the time you get to native languages with a million
speakers, isn't that plenty? Is there any significant advantage in Mandarin
having a billion native speakers over German having 83 million or Czech having
10 million, or generally trying to max(number_of_speakers) as a useful metric
already orders of magnitude above the number you could reasonably interact
with in a lifetime?

 _If learning Esperanto really solved the same problem that learning, say,
Spanish or Mandarin would solve,_

What problem are you saying that learning Mandarin solves?

~~~
oarabbus_
> Is there any significant advantage in Mandarin having a billion native
> speakers over German having 83 million or Czech having 10 million

Yes, definitely.

~~~
jodrellblank
Citation needed. I have no plans to ever go to China. Mandarin has an
estimated 0 utility for me. I have read more school-level German than I ever
will read or speak Mandarin in my life. The number of Mandarin speakers could
be 5 or 5 trillion, if they're all half a world away it doesn't affect me.
Germany is close, I have been there, I might go again.

Dunbar's number is around 150, as long as the number of speakers is sufficient
that there's a good chance of finding 500 to talk to in a lifetime, and 500
books or films of interest to consume in a lifetime, more than that seems no
benefit. That is, 100 people is not enough - but somewhere in the region of
tens or hundreds of thousands seems easily enough for a boundary.

"There are a billion people, therefore learn this language" is even less
convincing as a reason to learn something; it's popular, so you should do it".

~~~
oarabbus_
No, a citation is not needed.

And since you're so hell-bent against learning Mandarin, go learn German. It
won't be a complete and utter waste of time, unlike learning Esperanto.

~~~
jodrellblank
I spent five years learning German at school and got decent grades, but also
got nowhere in useful skill. I spent two years learning Latin at school and
got nowhere near comprehension. I spent some months learning Esperanto on and
off as an adult, and have spoken to people using it, read a simple book in it,
listened to podcasts in it, changed my understanding of what it means to learn
a different language, understood more about grammar and made many English
word-origin connections through it, and enjoyed it.

Your hating on something which doesn't affect you, then refusing to explain
your position is way more of a waste of time.

~~~
nilkn
You're attributing the difference in success here to Esperanto, but my guess
is the key differentiator was actually how you went about studying the
language and how interested and motivated you were.

I took two years of Spanish in high school and gained more or less nothing
from it. I decided one day as an adult I wanted to learn Spanish, and within a
few months I could hold (very basic) conversations in Spanish.

What did I do? Well, I probably did what you did with Esperanto. I started
reading extensive passages in untranslated Spanish even when I didn't know the
language, looking up any word or conjugation I couldn't remember. I more or
less ignored grammar, except when I just couldn't figure out why something
would be said one way instead of some other way. That quickly sent me down
some interesting rabbit holes that even native speakers struggled to fully
explain, but as a result I rapidly got to the point of being able to form
reasonably complicated sentences. I started listening to stuff in Spanish. Any
time I was about to ask someone a simple question in English, I'd ask myself,
"so how would I ask this in Spanish instead?" I obsessed over pronunciation,
and even though I'll never perfect it I'm much better than I ever was in high
school.

For what it's worth, my primary tool in all of this was just LingQ.

~~~
chillacy
I'm not the parent but while you are correct that it is the same, I would not
overlook the order of magnitude of difference in effort required either. If
you were learning Mandarin instead of Spanish for instance, the process would
be the same but everything would take ~4x as long, and based on the attrition
rates I've seen from English->Chinese learning, you'd be more likely to quit
before being able to read a 3rd grade passage.

