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Comment by creativeembassy | Hacker News Reader

If anyone else is interested in learning it, I'm getting back into it via Duolingo and that's working well for me so far.

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Saluton! Me too. I like the app but find the attempts at gamification a little annoying. I wish I could just turn all that off.

Mi opinias ke lernu.net estas bona hejmpaĝo por lerni Esperanton.

My first experience with Esperanto left me disillusioned because it looked silly. It tries to be universal by becoming a Frankenstein monster of the most popular languages. And the diacritics, it could have taken the opportunity to reduce them to the minimum indispensable, but no. Page = paĝo for some weird reason.

I've always wanted to learn Loglan/Lojban because of that, but those are even more niche.

I set up my keyboard so I can type the additional letters with the right alt key. There are keyboard layout options for Windows, Mac, and Linux as well as mobile keyboards.

For example: Right alt + c = ĉ

For linux its pretty simple, you just have to use: setxkbmap -layout us -variant altgr-intl -option esperanto:qwerty

Or one can just use the simple internet tradition that a letter followed by an x is as if it had the caret on it. For example, instead of ĉ just writing cx.

Actually, that's not how Esperanto works. There is a language that literally tries to be the "Frankenstein Monster of the most popular languages" for better or worse, but that is Interlingua. Esperanto on the other hand, while it takes roots from various Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, instead modifies them to fit a rational system. As part of that there is a rule of "one letter one sound". That's why it uses diacritics. paĝo and pago are pronounced differently. Languages that don't use diacritics (which are very rare, English being one of the few examples) deal with it by accepting that spelling and pronunciation have little to do with each other. Which is a terrible system.

IMO building an artificial language should have been an opportunity to simplify phonemes and writing. Did Esperanto really need "g" and "ĝ" phonemes? Did it really need more diacritics than the simplest accented letters?

Spanish is surprisingly close to "one letter one sound" for being an organic language. If you see "papa" and "papá", and know the rules of syllabic stress, you can pronounce them without ambiguity. And it only uses acute diacritics on vowels, and the letter "ñ".

I acknowledge that I'm probably biased towards Spanish because it's my native language. And honestly, languages heavy on diacritics, like Vietnamese, spook me.

If you use iOS you can download the Esperanto keyboard (Esperanta Klavaro) [0]

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/esperanta-klavaro/id957192189

Why is pago weird? I don't understand the Frankenstein part either? It uses a vocabulary that has a good bit in common with the romance languages. Not sure what else.

Well, pago isn’t weird, it’s paĝo that is.

The really weird letter in Esperanto is ĥ. It uses a sound that isn't very common in many languages so it's hard for a lot of speakers to pronounce. (It's like a "ch" sound in German.) Typographically it looks weird. There has been a general trend towards replacing it with a "k".

To me it sounds like a Spanish j. For example, ĥodiau (today) sounds to me as jodiau.

Today is "hodiaŭ". It uses the regular h.

Ĥ/ĥ is less common in esperanto and in some cases has been replaced with other letters.

You are right, I mixed the accents. Interesting, will lookup some words with ĥ.

That's what I was trying to ask lol. Not sure how to type that out on my phone without grabbing the word from another post.

To me it's not that weird once you learn it.

Does that mean, "My opinion about lernu.net is good, especially for learning Esperanto"?

I think the only word I wasn't able to understand was "hejmpaĝo", which I guessed to mean something like "especially"

Could google it, but finding it out by guessing and asking someone seems more interesting.

I imagine you'll kick yourself for not figuring this one out.

It means homepage (constructed from hejmo = home, and pago = page)

Ahh, of course! You're right, now that you told me it's very obvious. The whole sentence also makes more sense. Thanks :)

I have bursts of progress trying to learn Esperanto, also with Duolingo. I guess the unfortunate aspect of Esperanto is that you don't meet a lot of other learners in real life so it's a bit of a solo endeavour.

I give a lot of credit to whoever put together the Duolingo course, there's a lot of amusing innuendo with Adamo kaj Sofia and apt sentences like "Li trinkas bieron, cxar li estas malfelicxa".

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