Why learn Esperanto?

[Walinator]

Hello, hope everyone is doing well!

I've noticed that a number of people in this forum have learned or are learning Esperanto. I did a little bit of research (by reading the Wikipedia article), but I still dont think I quite understand why people want to learn the language. It doesn't have a lot of fluent speakers, no "classic" literature that you would want to read, or use for business/travel. That is not to say that these are the only reasons why one would want to learn a language, but they tend to be the most common. For this reason, I would like to ask the Ladies and Gentlemen of this forum a simple question(s). Why did you choose to learn Esperanto? If you haven't and it was a conscious decision, why didn't you?

[Le Baron]

To me it's a pure communication language, not especially something for reading books and writing works of theatre. That was its actual purpose. There are different views among Esperantists - as you may have gleaned from the wiki article: the finvenko people and those who like being in a little club and going to events, 'conlanging' and treat it like Klingon. I think it's clear what my view is.

The main reason for extensive written material, as far as I can see, has been to keep the language current. This is pretty normal even in national languages, but Esperanto has needed it more as originally there were people who weren't permanently in contact. It was also to prove to annoying naysayers that the language actually can form and express anything another language can. So the production of a novel, seen as a piece of linguistic and cultural art, has always been something Esperantists wanted to produce.

For me Esperanto represents a legitimate attempt at language parity; in terms of power relations. Whatever anyone wants to claim, it is multiple times easier to learn than any national language and yet when you've learned it you can say all the things you need and would ever want to say.

Here are two tiresome claims about:

Esperanto: It has no culture...no-one speaks it.

The first is wrong because over a century a certain culture has emerged. It isn't culinary or attached to any landscapes or valleys or kings or villages. More importantly it doesn't actually matter because it's a medium of communication, not a holiday destination or a key to unlocking the history of some country.
The second is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. 'No-one speaks it, therefore I won't learn it, so no-one will speak it.' Firstly, people do speak it. I've spoken to people who speak it and they've introduced me to other people who speak it. Together we spoke it. The answer to the lament: 'No-one plays tennis anymore...!' is to go out and buy a racquet, learn tennis, find another tennis player and start playing tennis.

There is proof dating back to the 70s that Esperanto taught in a school setting has vastly greater success in terms of rapid acquisition than comparable foreign languages taught in schools. What you get are simplified steps in language structure, plus a functioning language. Seems like a win-win situation to me.

Are there criticisms? Yes. Some probably legitimate. There is the claim it is Eurocentric..it might be true, but since all the world is clamouring to learn English or Spanish, what difference should that make? No-one is trying to get rich or extract money from you teaching Esperanto I can say that.
Other criticisms are answerable..the diacritics? Has anyone seen French or Czech or Vietnamese? The funny plurals? It is what it is, it must be accepted. There is no shortage of people with a plan for improvement for something that already works. You'd never get this with national language.

I truly believe it could be seriously pursued as a second language for people for communication. Something to dispense with the costly and culturally imperialistic baggage of English. People should be able to have something to facilitate easy communication internationally without having to submit to anyone's national language or pay through the nose to acquire it. It could easily be taught in schools and you can get people to operational level far faster than with English or French or Spanish or anything else. Its naysayers are blocking it needlessly.

I could go on.

[rdearman]

Hello, hope everyone is doing well!

I've noticed that a number of people in this forum have learned or are learning Esperanto. I did a little bit of research (by reading the Wikipedia article), but I still don't think I quite understand why people want to learn the language. It doesn't have a lot of fluent speakers, no "classic" literature that you would want to read, or use for business/travel. That is not to say that these are the only reasons why one would want to learn a language, but they tend to be the most common. For this reason, I would like to ask the Ladies and Gentlemen of this forum a simple question(s). Why did you choose to learn Esperanto? If you haven't, and it was a conscious decision, why didn't you?

I was one of the "didn't learn" people. I was even given free books by a member who is on the British Esperanto Cult (Radioclare will correct the name, I'm sure). But my main reason for not learning it was simply the people I met who spoke Esperanto, I wouldn't want to speak to an any language. I've since met people who are very nice, and I would speak to them in Esperanto if I could be bothered to learn it. But I was put off the language completely by the sort of Esperanto Cultists who demand language purity and any criticism of Esperanto is blasphemy. These people put me right off.

I had a discussion with a very lovely guy who was doing an Esperanto presentation (wave to Tim Owen) and we discussed the problem with these cultist types pressuring people. It actually makes people not want to learn.



However, it isn't accurate to say there isn't a lot of literature written in Esperanto because there is. Also, you can watch a bad film with William Shatner (Captain Kirk) in Esperanto. I think the USAF used to teach Esperanto to the aggressor squadrons at Red Flag exercises.

[Le Baron]

But my main reason for not learning it was simply the people I met who spoke Esperanto, I wouldn't want to speak to an any language.

Now this is a fair point and one I used to complain about myself on the old Lernu forum. It's well-known that there are people who turn up to conferences dressed top to toe in green, carrying a bag with a verda stelo and they tend to be...well 'eccentric' if you like. Anyone who has been to a conference will also know there are quite a lot of those who don't actually speak the language or speak it to any appreciable level.

However it seems to me that this has arisen because if it being adopted by conlang nutters who want to create all kinds of languages for their favourite Jim Henson creations in whatever low-grade science fiction tripe they're into.

Having said that I've also met mad people who speak French (and English). Esperanto doesn't have a monopoly on blockheads.

[chove]

I did try it once but I quickly realised I didn't like the sound of it. And it does have a lot of minor (or less minor) annoyances that one has to put up with in a natural language but when it's a conlang spoken by a small niche of people it's somehow harder to accept. Maybe that's unfair but oh well. I don't have anything against people who speak it, it's just not for me.

[iguanamon]

There are valid reasons to learn the language. They just aren't enough for me. With my languages, I can visit a place where they are spoken. If I got to a large city, I can find speakers driving taxis or ubers. I can go to a Brazilian, Cuban or Haitian restaurant. Finding an Esperanto uber/taxi driver will be next to impossible. Walking into a bar or restaurant in the Esperanto immigrant neighborhood of a large city- not happening. Getting hooked on a high budget, high quality series/original literature in Esperanto- not happening. At least with Haitian Creole, while it doesn't have a lot of high quality series or films, it does have native literature and poetry that help me to understand a culture of 11 million speakers and a country that is close to me. Same thing with Lesser Antilles French Creole which is close to me. I can overhear native-speakers here and interact with them. Odds are, other than being at a gathering, I'm not going to randomly hear Esperanto being spoken.

Yes, I can go to an Esperanto gathering/convention. Yes I can use it online. That's just not enough for me to put in the time to learn the language. While there is certainly a shared and valid Esperanto culture, it is not unique enough to fascinate me. What's there is not enough to pull me in.

So, that's just my personal preference. I think Esperanto-speakers do not need to defend their choice to learn the language nor do they need to defend promoting its use. Choosing to learn and use Esperanto is just as valid a choice as learning any language. Some people will be interested and some will not.

edited for clarity

[IronMike]

I first started learning Esperanto with ELNA's old mail course back in 1992. Did all 10 lessons (the only "distance learning" class I ever finished). Read some simple literature. Even wrote two issues of the now-dead (after 2 issues) of La Alaska Esperantisto. I also taught it to two guys from the Richardson book. Over the years since then I kept up with it simply passively; my job required a certain proficiency in Russian and BCS, and I needed to work on those, and keep getting paid.

I had virtually met a couple Esperanto speakers in early 2000 and had a similar experience to rdearman. I also had grown tired early-on from many US Esperantists acting like Esperanto would solve all the world's problems ("Goodbye al-Qaeda!") and, frankly, white-washing the socialist Esperanto history in great parts of Eastern Europe.

A couple things happened. I found the book La Danĝera Lingvo and "found my people," folks who were Esperanto speakers but were not afraid to speak truthfully about how some people wanted to use it. And how some people's lives were actually saved when western Europeans started rescuing eastern Europeans from the reactions of Hitler's and Stalin's regimes.

I have a huge interest in the early twentieth century, literature and history, and especially the peoples who were affected by the pogroms of maniacal dictators. Some of that history I can't read except in Esperanto translation. (I just finished a wonderful book called Medalionoj about Polish peoples' experience under the Nazis. I believe it is translated into English, but I can't get it out of my library, and the Esperanto version was only $3.) My favorite Esperanto book so far is Mi Stelojn Jungis al Revado (unsure how to translate this; I hung stars on my dreams? Something like that), about the disappearing of Esperantists in Stalin's Soviet Union. Fiction based in fact. Scary. Probably the most famous is Masquerade: Dancing Around Death by Tivadar Soros, about a Hungarian family trying to get out of dodge before the Nazis found them. Scary stuff, and originally published in Esperanto, and translated into a ton of languages. Again, in my interest area.

When I was last living in Moscow I girded my loins and went to an actual Esperanto gathering...and was pleasantly surprised. Only one or two weirdos out of a dozen! Better odds than I thought! And the lady who ran the meeting turned out to help me more than anyone previously. It was at that time that I decided I'd commit to improving my language and stop being an eterna komencanto, and to test, which I did and scored C1 in the writing/reading test. And in Moscow I spoke to people other than Russians, and our only common language was Esperanto, so that was kinda cool.

Now in Boston, the US-Canadian conference in 2019 was held here. Again I committed to the 3 full days and sure as anything, only a few weirdos. Three full days of 100% Esperanto. It was awesome. I was so immersed that when I pulled a Canadian gal aside, to ask her if she's originally from the Soviet Union, I could not, for the life of me, produce any spoken Russian. And I've been speaking that language for over 30 years!

Today I read a lot in Esperanto. I haven't gone to any monthly speaking meetings here. Mostly due to time and where they're held; the thought of being in traffic after being at work all day... But I read 5-6 books a year in Esperanto. Again, I'm reading things of interest to me, and for the most part books I can't get in English. Right now I'm reading the book Kiel Akvo de l' Rivero, which is set at the beginning of WWI. I also listen to a lot, mostly a radio station in Poland who broadcasts 2x a week, as well as a podcast that does an almost-hour show every 3 weeks or so; it was listening to that podcast that I realized the German ambassador in Moscow when I was there is a fluent Esperanto speaker. :O

I was all set to go to the Universala Esperanto gathering in 2020 in Montreal, but we all know what happened there. I'm still set to go at its "relaunch" in 2022. I send postcards monthly to Esperanto speakers all over the world, and in turn I get them.

All in all, it is a fun language. Easy to maintain and fun.

(edit to add info about listening.)

[rdearman]

when it's a conlang spoken by a small niche of people it's somehow harder to accept.

Again, this isn't entirely accurate. The estimate of the number of Esperanto speakers is 2 million plus people. So double the number of people that speak Welsh and 250,000 more than the number of people who speak Latvian. The problem is you can't just go to Esperanto land like you can to Latvia or Wales.

EDIT: Also there are 2nd and 3rd generation native Esperanto speakers. (I know one.)

[devilyoudont]

1) High probability of meeting people who share my interests (languages, peace, etc). It remains extremely difficult to meet people who share interests with me in my other target languages. They don't use the same social media, and the social media they do use is extremely gated. In some cases, there is not much of a community at all for interest X within language Y (This is also true of Esperanto for some of my other interests) (For example, I cannot find any community like the Language Learners Forum in Japanese)

2) Cultural exchange with people whose languages I will never learn, which wouldn't have been possible thru English. It's more typical to meet Esperantists whose Esperanto is better than their English, but I've also met Esperantists who do not speak English. People who I have spoken to in this category are more likely to be ordinary working class people like me who I just simply wouldn't have been able to connect with without the language. (I have done this with Iranian, brazilian, chinese, indonesian, russian, and french people)

3) There are books in Esperanto I have a genuine interest in reading (Poemo de Utnoa is one example).

4) I have some interest in traveling using Pasporta Servo. Yes, I won't be able to speak to a taxi driver. But, to me, being able to speak to an actual local in more depth than is possible for me in practically any other language is a fair enough trade off for me.

5) I believe it's a useful tool for monolinguals to learn how to learn a language, regardless of whether or not they intend to stick with it. Such students of the language could more or less reap the benefits of learning how to learn a language up to lower advanced within about 8 months, intermediate much faster than that. There may exist a conlang which provides this faster than Esperanto, but I believe reasons 1-4 mean that Esperanto is more likely to provide some quantifyable utility to a learner, even if they do not intend to stay in the language for more than a year.

There are also reasons not to learn Esperanto, but that's not the topic of the thread so I just stuck with reasons which keep me engaged in the Esperanto community despite that I more or less only started learning it out of curiosity at the start.

[Deinonysus]

Most people either love Esperanto or hate it, so I think I'm in the minority as someone who's fairly neutral towards it.

Esperanto was the first foreign language I could think in, after having had little success studying Hebrew, Spanish, and Japanese in school. I think it's very good as an introduction to language learning, especially for speakers of major European languages. It can be learned quickly and provides quick gratification. I also think that the community and over 100-year history are very cool.

After learning more about constructed languages I came to the conclusion that it is very poorly designed by modern standards (although it was orders of magnitude better than Volapük, which started the International Auxiliary Language craze). I think jan Misali's review is a good summary of its main flaws:


But all the same, I think it was helpful in my progress as a language learning hobbyist, and I don't regret the time I spent on it many years ago. I just don't plan on spending any more time on it.

Personally, I think that Indonesian is close to the perfect International Auxiliary language due to its simple and straightforward grammar, lack of especially challenging sounds, and vocabulary borrowings from many different sources, including Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Western languages. It does not suffer from any of Esperanto's flaws. If I were ever going to make an IAL, it would basically be Indonesian with more loanwords from the above sources and maybe a simpler phonology.