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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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 )
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
Interesting. This seems counter-intuitive for someone who spoke many languages and apparently delighted in their diversity. I also agree with the comment above yours that wanting humanity to "be one" and to be able to communicate universally, is not mutually exclusive with them maintaining their separate languages concurrently. Do you have any suggested sources for me to read about Zamenhof's later views?
My understanding of Zamenhof’s views is based on reading his complete works in the edition prepared by that Japanese Esperantist, which I could do as I was closely involved with an Esperanto library. As this was some years ago and I am no longer involved in Esperanto, I am sorry that I cannot cite a specific passage, but I am quite sure that my claim is correct, and I would urge you to go to those sources.
People talk about the engineered perfection of Esperanto/Lojban, but perhaps so-called problems with natural languages actually have subtler benefits that we take for granted. People hate irregular verbs, but there must be some reason why they persist in natural languages. My personal theory is that natural languages contain emergent coding theory to allow native speakers to better understand each other when speaking in a "noisy" channel (including when the "noise" is just the fact that they're both chattering super fast because, you know, they're having a natural conversation).
Most, but not all. Agglutinative languages don't seem to use irregular verbs much. When I studied Turkish, I recall learning only one irregular verb. From some googling, Mongolian also has very few. Japanese has a lot, relatively, at around 10 (depending who you ask and how you count).
I'm not sure why irregularity would emerge from lossy transmission. I would think regularity would be a greater benefit here. I assume it's just a historical accident that arises when verbs stand on their own and you don't have to do anything with them. When you're just starting to have language, it must take some real insight to realize that there is a special relationship between "go" and "went", and it's the same as the relationship between "be" and "was". But if you regularly (ha) need to agglutinate a pile of endings on your verbs, then using unique words for each tense would quickly become a pain in the butt.
I find agglutinative languages are simpler than other types of languages in many ways, and I haven't studied linguistics enough to know if that's inherent to all of them or just coincidence from the small number of such languages I've studied. Turkish plurals are perfectly regular (there are 2 possible endings, depending on the word's final vowel), and Japanese doesn't really have plurals at all. Neither language has gendered words, or definite articles. Turkish has no diphthongs, and Japanese doesn't really (depending on your POV), either.
Esperanto actually looks somewhat complex to me! It reminds me of my own (failed) attempt to learn French. It seems to have a lot of baggage from the Romance languages, presumably to make it seem more familiar to those speakers. I'm a little surprised it wasn't simplified further.
Esperanto doesn't have 'engineered perfection', it has either awful, awkward, or endearing flaws and irregularities depending on how you want to look at them. (Kombo - not a comb, but an act of combing something, even though it's a noun word ending; Norda, Suda the compass directions north and south instead of Norda, Malnorda, "kaseto" a cassette or a small "kaso", and so on, k.t.p.). They could be avoided in an engineered perfect language, and even the creator of Esperanto went on to make another language (Ido) using what he learned the first time to improve on some of the flaws he saw, which nobody took up and he later abandoned.
My layperson's view on it is that "everything is regularised" means "no convenient shortcuts" for the benefit of "anyone around the world can use it". That's a huge problem for day to day use when you and your friends have to willingly choose to say an inconvenient sentence over and over and over, just so that a person from a thousand miles away could understand you if they were ever here. It's a bit of a tragedy of the commons - you do what's more convenient locally in the short term, and the long term wider scope suffers for it.
Esperanto's original ideas were to have many compound words - make them up on the fly, to keep the vocabulary load smaller. It took off early in French speaking regions and gained a lot of French-root loan words, and then got compound word alternatives, so there ended up being multiple ways to say the same thing. e.g. eyeglasses are okulvitroj (eye + glasses). They're also okulvitro (singular) because imperfection. And they are nazumo, from pince-nez, which is nose+"related in a non-specific way" suffix. Then you get really weird words built up from suffix games like "estonteco" which is a "play with words" way of saying "the future"; there's no way I'm going to create or deconstruct that on the fly, possibly no way you'd work it out without learning it.
I don't think that estonteco is any more out there than many European languages' coinages for "future", e.g. Finnish tulevaisuus, French l'avenir, or Romanian viitor which are all derivations of the verb "to come" and foreign learners don't really have any problem figuring out the meaning.
In fact, now that I think about it, Zamenhof may have calqued the Esperanto word specifically on Russian будущее "that which is to be", i.e. " the future".
If you were to start a new language today, wouldn't it make more sense to start with an existing common language, like English, and make simplifications to it until you reach something like Esperanto?
The only downside I can think of is that we're taught in school that slightly different spelling etc. is strictly incorrect, so there's a stigma you'd somehow have to overcome for the native speakers.
So, like an English creole? There are plenty of these around, and none of them has become popular as an enduring cross-language standard in the way English itself has. (Modern English itself is mildly creolized compared to other major languages, though.) Esperanto actually makes a bit more sense from that POV.
I would argue that English already ended up with a simplified variant in the form of international English as practised by many second language learners of English. It's not American English, it's not British English, but it hovers somewhere in between, and tends towards leaving out the idioms that require a higher degree of literacy (and being well-read in particular). It's the language spoken at international conferences, colleges outside of the Anglosphere, and political summits; and countless bastardized variants are practised by tourists world-wide.
Bear in mind that ⅔ of all the English speakers (over a billion people) are second language users of the language.
Of course what you are left with is a language that doesn't really reach its potential for beautiful prose until you settle for a specific 'proper' variant of English — with all its bells and whistles, comparatively fixed orthography, and quaint expressions.
Isn’t that sort of Esperanto? When it was made French was the dominant language in Europe so most Esperanto words come from French, then the grammar was simplified but still allows for French word orderings.
Is there any reason to think Esperanto would retain its grammatical simplicity if it were to actually become a lingua franca? Once it's truly out in the world to a much larger degree, there would be no way to "control" it anymore.
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.
> Esperanto is a hobby/philosophy for denizens of rich Western countries to play with.
I am a long since ex- Esperantist who is not keen to defend the language and movement, but your post is way off the mark. Esperanto was a decently big fad in the former Eastern Bloc, because learning it allowed you to correspond with exotic foreigners and maybe even get visa invitations to go visit other countries (for Esperanto events) you otherwise might never dream of. Sure, some of those countries are now much more prosperous and developed, but they weren’t then. My memories of European Esperanto congresses decades ago are a lot of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, and Romanians clearly on the lookout for a Western European spouse, or stuffing their suitcases with local goods they could sell back home.
Similarly, West Africa has always had its own local Esperanto scene, for roughly the same reasons of being able to get visas etc.
There was a lively Esperanto community in Yugoslavia, which was a non-aligned country that had more travel opportunities, but still wasn’t a "rich Western country".
No English is not at all a fully neutral playing ground. It's in many countries a strong differentiator between rich/elite class and poor people. It's already the case in a big part of Europe and even more present in the rest of the world. For most Europeans, Esperanto can be learned quickly as grammar is very simple and vocabulary share a large root with European languages. On the other end, English is a big mess of exceptions (grammar and pronunciation). This requires extensive training to reach a basic level.
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.
"It’s not perfect but I’ve spoken to enough Esperantists in Asia who have remarked that English is way way way harder and speakers are less forgiving."
Anecdote: We had a Japanese Esperantist visiting a local meeting in the US and of course asked if Esperanto is really ten times easier than English for Japanese speakers.
His reply (in Esperanto): "No. It's a hundred times easier."
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.
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).
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) 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.
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").
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Again it depends what you're looking for, if you just want to talk to as many speakers as possible and don't care how long it takes, then yes, spend 5 years intensely learning Mandarin, everything else is a waste of time.
But if you want a fast path to learning a foreign language (which plugs you into a meta language learning community), then Esperanto is very interesting.
Learning Esperanto first may lead to faster proficiency in French, but it may not be good proficiency. This is because learning the words first through Esperanto would ingrain some bad habits in the learner that will be hard to eradicate after he or she moves on to French.
What I have in mind is the fact that French distinguishes between the vowels /ɔ/ and /o/, and between /ɛ/ and /e/. When learning new words, foreigners must get this distinction down right, it is key to having a decent accent in French, and in some cases avoiding misunderstandings. Yet when French roots were used in Esperanto, those vowels were leveled as just /o/ and /e/, respectively. That means that the learner does not learn the right French vowels from the start, and is likely to continue using in French the /o/ learned from Esperanto when the vowel is actually /ɔ/ etc.
In modern language teaching, it is considered vital to avoid pronunciation mistakes from the very start, because otherwise they become too firmly rooted to get rid of later.
This is a huge hypothetical scenario, I'd caution any experiment with an N=1 but this is an N=0 example.
Anecdotally I don't think my French is worse off because I learned Esperanto first, (nor any of the other languages I learned). If anything, learning more languages makes me more aware of the importance of pronunciation as a meta-learning aspect of languages.
It's not like those French roots aren't completely mangled by English learners anyways, words like "-ion" in "situation" and "conversation". But you learn just like any other learner.
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?
I think it’s a disingenuous interpretation to think I was suggesting one could talk to every native speaker of a target language.
With Spanish, say, I gain an immediately practical language that I can use weekly if not daily right here in the US. It gives me unprecedented access to the people and culture of Mexico, Spain, and much of the entire continent of South America. I gain access to a vast body of original literature, music, and media in Spanish that isn’t just a translation but unique to the language. These are the sorts of things solved by learning a language like Spanish.
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".
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.
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.
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.
I guess it's more like 150 according to the studies in the second link. Anecdotally vocab acquisition is much faster in Esperanto due to the regularity and afix system, where learning a single new word root tends to give another dozen variants "for free".
By the way the second link is a critique of a single study, and it makes a pretty wild claim: "To see whether previous study of Esperanto would assist children in the subsequent learning of East-Asian languages (particularly Japanese)."
The claim that Eo helps French acquisition is much better supported from the links in the wikipedia article, considering the more similar grammars and vocabulary.
Most languages have some kind of derivational morphology that gives you variants "for free". The Wikipedia article on morphological derivation gives some examples for English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_derivation
I don't doubt that pre-existing knowledge of Esperanto helps with learning French due to the large number of cognates, but it's implausible it helps so much that you get "faster French acquisition after first learning Esperanto than learning French the whole time". Cognates would at best allow you to learn Esperanto + French in the same time it takes to learn French alone, but Esperanto isn't 100% Romance-based, so even that is unlikely.
In English getting the exceptions wrong ("I washed, I jumped, I readed, I runned, I eated, I writed") makes you sound like a child or an idiot (Ralf Wiggum from the Simpsons). In Esperanto, ending a word in "-e" makes it an adverb which means you can stick it on any root word to force adverbness. In English "-ly" makes something an adverb, except when it doesn't; "brolly" which is a noun, "fly" which is a noun, a verb, maybe an adjective, maybe sometimes an adverb ("fly-tipping"?), or "scaly" which is an adjective and doesn't become "scalyly" to make it an adverb. They aren't "for free" in English because you can't trust the pattern.
but it's implausible it helps so much that you get "faster French acquisition after first learning Esperanto than learning French the whole time"
I'm not convinced that it's true, but it surely is plausible; the other side of "can't trust the pattern" is that you can't easily see the pattern. Learning arithmetic then calculus seems better than trying to learn both at the same time; learning an instrument first then playing in an orchestra would be better than trying to join an orchestra and play with them while learning to play an instrument at all. People recommend beginners start with Python rather than 3D engine development in C++, or work on a model of an engine before they take a helicopter apart, right? Why not "learn European grammar rules in simple patterns" then "use that knowledge to climb faster through native languages which aren't so simple where the patterns are less clear"?
Esperanto has a Wikipedia of a quarter million articles, the Klingon Wikipedia was locked because there weren't enough speakers (last estimate from the 1996: 12 speakers) and the language is fixed and too limited to make for reasonable articles.
"Don't prioritize Esperanto over Klingon" is trolling.
If you're considering going to work in China, and wondering if you should learn Spanish instead of Mandarin, what are you doing. If you're trying to get a promotion in a Spanish-speaking company and considering learning Mandarin instead of Spanish, what are you doing. If you're considering learning Chinese or Spanish for utility, it seems extremely unlikely that they would lead you to exactly the same opportunies; if you can't tell which would lead to better opportunities AND you can't tell which you have more interest in, that suggests you don't have much utility for either, much interest in either, and should do something else more immediately beneficial instead. e.g. skills training for a specific promotion at your place of work, or sought after skills in your local job market.
If you're considering learning anything for fun or interest, then learn the thing which you find fun or interesting, not the thing which internet people tell you that you "should" based on something so completely irrelevant as how popular it is. Keeping up with the Jones's is a mistake, not a desirable way to live.
