Today is Esperanto Book Day – why I learned it (2018)
martinrue.com
martinrue.com
3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20802326
2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16014476
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835090
2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11765214
2015 (a bit): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10019175
2015 (a lot): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9625048
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.
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.
In all of them, the Esperanto was quite good but the content is just so clunky. It was like Communist Bernstein Bears.
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.
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.
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.
(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)
Just a one-line sed script.
$ echo 'Laux Ludoviko Zamenhof bongustas fresxa cxehxa mangxajxo kun spicoj.' | sed 's/cx/ĉ/g; s/Cx/Ĉ/g; s/gx/ĝ/g; s/Gx/Ĝ/g; s/hx/ĥ/g; s/Hx/Ĥ/g; s/jx/ĵ/g; s/Jx/Ĵ/g; s/sx/ŝ/g; s/Sx/Ŝ/g; s/ux/ŭ/g; s/Ux/Ŭ/g;'
Laŭ Ludoviko Zamenhof bongustas freŝa ĉeĥa manĝaĵo kun spicoj.This is, of course, exactly what many of us did, and what you daily see us doing here.
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.
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
"They" (Zamenhof, the original creator) did that, it exists. Twice over, as the h-system he proposed in 1888 in the first year or two of Esperanto, and as the x-system: https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-sistemo and the https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-sistemo
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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".
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.
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."
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
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.
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").
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.
I'm curious why you feel this way (no judgment, genuinely curious).
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.
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.
Research is fairly promising for French, doesn't look like it helps as much with spanish, or at least nobody's done research on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
Anecdotally it works well for french because you're secretly learning French word roots, and it builds confidence in the process of language learning.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Yes, definitely.
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".
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.
Your hating on something which doesn't affect you, then refusing to explain your position is way more of a waste of time.
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.
Whats your standard for "proficiency" here? After 50 hours, you're not going to have a very extensive vocabulary.
> studies show faster French acquisition after first learning Esperanto than learning French the whole time.
Which studies? If you mean those listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant... then they don't actually support that conclusion. Some more details on one of those studies in particular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019
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.
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.
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"?
If you're a polyglot who wants to learn two dozen languages, then go for it, but don't prioritize Esperanto over Klingon or Elvish.
"Don't prioritize Esperanto over Klingon" is trolling.
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.