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Comment by Cyberdog | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why someone would learn something like Esperanto when they can put that time and effort into learning a language that people actually use in the real world instead.

Now excuse me as I go back to making a Snake clone in Zig.

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Lots of reasons.

First a lot of us native English speakers are monolingual, because that's all we need to be. A lot of us view fluency in another language as something reserved for incredibly intelligent people. Esperanto is so easy to learn that it disabuses us of that notion.

Secondly, linguistic curiosity. What's a constructed language designed to be easy to use actually like? Is it as easy as people say it is?

Lastly, community. There aren't as many esperanto speakers as there are Hindi or Spanish or Mandarin speakers, sure. No one is denying that. But a brief search suggests there's 100,000 active speakers, which isn't nothing.

To be fair, if you're a native English speaker learning a second language, you'll probably get just as much out of learning Esperanto as you would German or French or Indonesian.

At the end of the day, it's a hobby.

Those languages have extensive literatures which you could read in the original. Esperanto doesn't.

It is unfair to say that Esperanto doesn’t have original literature. There is extensive poetry, music, fiction, and even movies which are written in Esperanto. For example, one of my favorite authors Þorbergur Þórðarson (a legend in Iceland) wrote some of his work in Esperanto (which I’ve actually never read).

I know it does, but is it comparable to what you get access to if you learn French or German or Indonesian?

Not at all. But there are culturally rich languages with even fewer speakers then Esperanto, and people still learn them. Consider for example people learning ancient Norse, so they can read the Icelandic sagas in the original, or Ancient Greek, or even Klingon or Tolkian elvish so they can understand a fictional Klingon opera or Elven poem.

When you learn Esperanto you get access to a specific literature not available in Indonesian or German. That might be worth it for some people.

The fact that its a constructed language is a big part of the appeal. It's fun to speak something that's logically structured and easy to learn. It doesn't have anywhere near the level of content of other languages, but it's still enjoyable.

Well to be fair Indonesian is a constructed language (dialect) as well. But I get you.

Post poterea a scriber e dicer in Interlingua, tanto io ama scriber sententias aleatorimente

I'm learning Spanish because I enjoy travelling to Spanish-speaking countries and do so often. Learning a language is such a massive, multi-year undertaking that I can't imagine doing it only as a hobby!

That's exactly the problem many people have with learning languages, they think it's a huge undertaking and cannot be taken lightly. So they don't even try. Imagine if sports - running, basketball, soccer etc - were thought to be the same, that one cannot do them for fun as a hobby. Absurd! We'd have lot less monolinguals when we'd stop taking language learning so seriously.

I speak 4 languages, have passive understanding of another 3-4 and rudimentary basics of 3-5 more. Never worked hard for any of them, it has always been for fun as hobby. My spouse says I'm gifted with languages but it's not true, I'm just playing around until something sticks. I just don't have that mental block.

As someone who has studied both Esperanto and Indonesian, I'd say they are roughly comparable (although Esperanto is easier). But Indonesian is pretty easy as far as natural languages go. People wonder why anyone would bother as Indonesia isn't really a major country (and most of their population actually speaks things like Javanese rather than standard Indonesian) and would say learning Mandarin would be more useful. Which objectively it is, but I've also studied that, for a considerably more amount of time than I've studied Esperanto or Indonesian, and with less success.

Because it is very easy to learn and help learn more languages.

Since its a mix between Romance, Slav and Germanic, it can easily act as a gateway, like if you speak a romance language and want to learn Slavic, starting with Romanian the learning Russian will be easier.

With Spanish you cover Latin America, Spain a good chunk of the US, 33% of the English language and a big chunk of Lusosphere, Francosphere and Italosphere.

But that's not the idea, at least for me. Learning languages is useful to keep your brain on edge. I speak French, English and German, and since I wanted to learn a Slavic language, i wanted to 'learn how to learn', a bit like learning scala in school is more interesting straight Java, because you add a FP paradigm, or coming from OO, learning ocaml might cover more than learning Haskell, despite being less pure.

And i read a EU study that read something like 'rather than teaching 5 years of English at school, we might be better of teaching 2 years of Esperanto then 3 years of English, especially for people whose mother tongue isn't Germanic based'. And then explain that the difference in English fluency between northern and southern Europe cannot be solely explained by education and the maternal tongue also have a significant effect.

So I'm learning Esperanto (i wanted to move to Estonia before covid, nowadays learning a new language is less pressing tbh...)

Well, in my case I am pro practicality. I can understand 60-70% of the spoken English and almost 99% of the technical one, so with Spanish and English I can communicate with a huge chunk of people across the world. OFC writting and speaking it's very difficult to me, as I live on a non-native country, but I'm able to talk the basics of a subject at least.

With Interlingua, these people are trying to do with Latin and Romances what Spanish did 500-1000 years ago first with the peninsula (Spanish was the lingua franca between the Iberian kingdoms) and later across the pond.

To me it looks as if the German, Dutch, English and Norwergian/Sweden/Dane language speakers tried to create a proto Neogermanic language to be able to be understood between themselves, when they already have the English language. If any, they could just radically change the English spelling being closer to the Nordic languages (cutting down the vowel amount to a max of 7).

I think it is likely the easiest way to speak with interesting people from many countries.

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