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> 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)

> it shouldn't be too hard to figure out a way to convert ASCII to the right letters.

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.

> 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

"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.

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.