How Does Esperanto Sound?

It’s probably the same for Wikipedia in English ; in French the minute you touch the Esperanto-related articles you get hordes of Esperantists reverting your changes. If you introduce some (sourced) criticism of the language or anything about its low number of speakers you’re labeled as anti-Esperanto. This is an area of Wikipedia I don’t want to touch anymore.

Your case is not only different from the one I'm claiming it helps (you already spoke Mandarin natively) but also I'm specifically claiming it helps monolinguals who are learning their first non-native language. So unless you went Mandarin --> Esperanto --> English and found Esperanto didn't help you learn English at all then I what I said doesn't apply to you. If you were either bilingual before learning Esperanto I don't think it'd have been very useful as a "diving board" to learning another language as you've already have the knowledge of speaking two languages. And I don't wish to make any assumptions, but if you've been bilingual your entire life I don't think you can even accurately imagine what it is like to be monolingual. Bilinguals have an easier time learning a third language than monolinguals have learning a second [0] [1] [2].

I personally give credit to 3 months of learning Esperanto for helping me get over a huge hurdle in my Japanese studies (after 2 years of studying). Not because Esperanto and Japanese have anything in common - but because learning certain grammatical structures in Esperanto helped the Japanese equivalents finally "click" after I had been struggling with learning them for so long. This doesn't seem to be an uncommon occurrence within the Esperanto community (for those with non-Esperanto target languages). The plural of anecdotes is of course not "data" but the studies (however criticized) and experiences of countless people (including myself) all point to it helping.

I hear plenty of stories from people who've never bothered to learn it saying they won't learn it because they'd rather learn their target language instead. It's difficult to even find a story from someone who's learned it and claims it didn't help them at all in learning a non-Esperanto target language. I've tried Googling around a bit - I can only ever find people who shit on conlangs as a concept and refuse to learn one.

The longest and hardest thing when learning a language is learning how to learn a language and that's what I personally believe Esperanto (or any conlang really) helps with. I would only ever personally recommend a brief stint (no more than a month or two) of Esperanto for monolinguals.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3583091/#b22-ce...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19648456

[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110201110915.h...

> Have you ever met a single person in your life who was fluent or at least good conversational in Esperanto but could not speak English?

Yes, definitely. When I was active in the Esperanto movement in the 1990s and early millennium, a huge amount of the Eastern Europeans who attended congresses or hosted foreigners through the movement's hospitality-exchange system had little or no English skills. They had learned Russian, German, or French in school, not English. This was also the case for some Esperantists from francophone nations of Africa; some of those countries were historically so fixated on French as the international language that English teaching in schools took off only recently.

Nowadays the younger generations of Esperantists are likely to speak English, but to judge from photos, the crowd attending the main annual Esperanto congress is generally pretty geriatric, so that older generation without English is still commonly met.

yup, several, and those who did speak english often did it poorly, while their esperanto was fluent.

Yeah, English isn't easy to learn as a language but it's easy to learn in general because as a non-native speakers it's impossible to escape. I had private language lessons for German and English as well as had both languages taught at school since the age of 7, but by the age of ~16 I was only fluent in one - English. I attribute this 100% to the fact that English media and games are literally everywhere, while German ones were a bit harder to come by. If I wanted to explore the internet as a kid it has to be done in English, so my English grew at an exponential rate, despite both languages getting the same amount of learning time.

I'd recommend signing up for a VPN in order to get around region blocking, and watching whatever the public television sites in Germany, Austria and Switzerland make available for free streaming online.

Or, if you like podcasts, just switch to German-language podcasts. That's how I keep my French brushed up, and it works a treat.

FWIW, I think the same works for Esperanto. I don't speak Esperanto (yet) so I don't know their quality, but I looked into availability of media recently because I've been thinking of learning it, and it seems that there are plenty of podcasts in esperanto, and even some international news services that do a regular program in esperanto. Not anywhere near as much as English, of course, but it looks like plenty enough to keep a body entertained on the way to B2 level or so.

The importance of consumable media should not be underestimated.

My native language is Finnish, which is farther from English than Hindi. But I learnt English at a very young age simply via TV, Games and Movies. And that’s the reason why English skills are so high here in general. It doesn’t matter that English is ”clunky”. It’s so pervasive that it’s hard not to learn it.

> There is a lot of English-language media to study, and a lot of people speak English to practice with

This is so important. While I've at some point knew both Dutch and German well enough to hold a basic conversation or read articles, in practice even living in the Netherlands it's hard to find a situation that wouldn't be served just as well (or better, if you're a beginner) by English. There are some benefits, but they're either a rather specific case (inburgering), or only start outweighing convenience of English once you're reasonably fluent (like speaking it in social situations). That's not a helpful dynamic for learning a language.

> This is a similar problem with any non-English language

I had the same issue with Spanish. I studied Spanish one hour everyday for one year, just for the fun of learning a new language. Then I stopped for some reason and I realized I didn't have any opportunity to practice (other than actively learning).

On the other hand, although English is my second language, I consume mostly (American-)English media. I only watch English youtube videos, I read English forums and so on... There is just so much more content available in English that I don't even bother searching in my native language (French).

English is actually useful, because it connects you to a huge culture. Many complain about the spelling, since it's not phonetic, but few recognize the value of that.

Latin in English is recognizable as Latin, Portuguese as Portuguese, etc. A Scot and a Midwesterner may pronounce the same words differently, understand eachother without much difficulty, and spell things the same.

Saw this convincing and entertaining video on the topic the other day:

https://youtu.be/GiVs05yq9-o

> I speak German and trying to keep up with the language in America is nearly impossible because I can't find any good source of German language

I find that hard to believe. Nowadays it is so easy to get a lot of stuff online.

> books

For older stuff there is the English Gutenberg or the German Gutenberg site and Wikisource also has some stuff.

And almost all books released in German are available as DRM free ePubs. Sign up to e.g. https://www.ebook.de/ with an email and minimal fake address (they require one even if you don't buy physical books) and pay with paypal.

> or TV shows or movies here in the US.

The public stations put a lot of stuff online. Google for "Mediathek" and the channel name (ARD, ZDF, 3Sat, ARTE, ORF, SRF). Most stuff shouldn't be geolocked and if it is, youtube-dl works also on those Mediatheken, too and if it is really geolocked, try the option '--geo-bypass-country de'. If that doesn't work, get a VPN like NordVPN.

Youtube also has lots of stuff. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_(Medienangebot) is a network of publicly funded producers, but it is entirely online, geared towards younger viewers but has lots of informative channels. Two of my favorites are mailab (short clips, topic always something scientific) or kurzgesagt (similar style as xkcd but with colored animations [they are Munich based, started out in English but added German content since being payed for it]). And the best thing is that all those shows are subtitled.

Depending on your age and if you are watching Let's Plays, people like Gronkh and the Rocketbeans might suit you. Or look for German channels on Twitch.

And as others already said, podcasts are big in Germany. Or online radio stations.

Also Netflix now. Of course "Dark" but especially"How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)" is a great one.

> And beyond trying to legally purchase them, it's difficult to even pirate German language media. It just doesn't exist.

It does. You're just looking in the wrong places. :-)

Mldonkey is surprisingly often still used for that. Also some plain old download sites (granted, that are not that easy to find if you're not a regular on German sites).

Anybody can hit me up if they want some pointers (mail from profile, dingir_bhaak on Twitter, or bhaak on Freenode IRC).

I think it is.

-phonetic spelling -no exceptions, no irregular word forms -simple grammar, few conjugations -much faster vocab acquisitions due to correlatives

These are all huge advantages. Even if word stems are 100% new, the amount of total memorization required is drastically smaller.

Well, there is no absolute scale regarding "easy to learn", it always depends what is your current language background and the discrepancy it has with the new language you aim to learn.

That said, Esperanto stays way much easier to learn than any Occidental language, even for people having a Roman language as native language.

Now, surely you can come with even more easier to learn language, which dodge some of the most criticized defects of Esperanto, like Western centrism vocabulary. Maybe Toki Pona is a candidate on this point.

To my mind, what makes Esperanto more interesting than other planed language is its community and an already large body of original cultural works. Sure it's far less smaller than what you can get with English, but it's already enough to occupy more than a human life span. That is interesting, to my mind, in the measure of the low cost you have to pay to enter it.

As a person with a Roman native language, I don't doubt that learning Mandarin, Japanese or some Bantu language would give me far more exotic enlargement of my world view. However the cost is also probably several orders of magnitude greater. At this price, I think anyone can learn both Esperanto, get full access to what it can gives, and invest just a bit less in any of the other aimed languages. At worst it will make you slightly less skilled in that ones, but that is not even certain as while learning more languages you generally become better at learning more languages.

> And I remember calculating the number of hours wasted in that one meeting, and how much time would have been saved had Esperanto been part of the company onboarding.

One thing I'm not sure of is whether someone who doesn't speak a Romance or Germanic language natively can get better communicative skills in Esperanto with 100 hours of good instruction than in English with several thousand hours of bad (or informal) instruction. I think it's possible, but very far from certain. Remember that vocabulary is still an issue¹, and also that Esperanto will contain some phonemes that non-Europeans will likely have trouble with.

Those bad English speakers in your conference call are already coming in with a lot of prior English experience, which the company in most cases didn't have to pay for. It's just experience that wasn't especially helpful at making them good at using English the way the conference call demanded.

Another challenge is whether the Esperanto lessons for your hypothetical company will be available in all of the prospective employees' native languages (which will make the training a lot more expensive), and still another is whether employees will follow the policy and use Esperanto regularly even in offices where 90% of the staff are native-level speakers of some other major world language.

¹ It's true that it's far simpler to learn -i -as -is -os -us -anto and -j -n -jn than the dozens (or more) of verb and noun inflections in a typical Indo-European language. But your new colleagues will still have to learn thousands of new morphemes in order to have a fluent conversation, and if they're not already fluent in a European language, they won't have any easy mnemonics, nor easy cognates to use to guess at meanings.

> Only one clearly neutral noun exists: homo = “person” (cf. French homme = “man”). Even the affix ‑ul, although glossed as “person”, is widely treated as male by default; if it wasn't, “young people” would always be junuloj instead of junuloj kaj junulinoj!

The language evolves. The gender system of modern Esperanto is remarkably similar to English: pronouns are he/she/it depending on the gender and animacy of the referent; nouns don't have grammatical gender, but may refer to a gendered class of people or animals (mostly family relations, but also a few relatively rare terms like duke, duchess, abbot, abbess, steer, cock).

The vast majority of nouns are what the Complete Handbook of Esperanto Grammar (PMEG) calls "sekse neutraj radikoj" (sexually neutral roots), and most speakers today treat these as completely gender neutral, referring to any individual, and many have done so since the early 20th century, in contrast to the "traditional" use of the "-in" suffix when referring to an individual woman or groups of only women.

That's actually a matter of debate. I studied spanish throughout my high school years, and while I was decent enough at speaking and reading/writing, my ability to comprehend spoken spanish in the real-world was still effectively zero because I never learned how to process it at the speed that native speakers used. I had better luck with French in college though, and Esperanto was still the easiest by far.

That said, there are some who claim that learning 1 year of Esperanto and 3 years of French leads to better fluency than studying just french for 4 years. This article on wikipedia has some interesting information on those claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...

The latin-roots that you learn from spanish and french are also present in Esperanto for the most part, so the semi-mutual understanding part you mention is actually still a benefit from Esperanto.

Esperanto isn't intended to be anyone's native language (it's an "international auxiliary language") so that's a weird way to compare speakership.

Very wrong I'd say. I was able to read more at 3 weeks than I could with 3 years of Spanish. Spanish might be easier than Latin, but verb conjugations and irregularities in the grammar is no joke. Esperanto gives you a detour around all of that.

You can literally learn most of Esperanto grammar in the time it takes to learn the difference between "soy/estar" and "por/para" in Spanish.

Those are just two Spanish concepts that students spend days learning. Look at a table of contents in a Spanish textbook and count the concepts. Now review an Esperanto textbook. It was designed for fast acquisition. Things that you have to learn in any language - like numbers, verb forms, days of the week, time, spelling, etc - are designed to be as simple as possible.

Take a book like "501 Spanish verbs" and adapt it to Esperanto. The book will shrink down to one page, since all verbs are regular. That page will further shrink down because there are fewer conjugations. All conjugations that do exist are composable - each conjugation dimension can be applied separately. They are even consistent between parts of speech.

How many people, who are making a serious multi-year effrot in learning a foreign language, no how to say "flutter" in that language? It's not unlikely that Esperanto learners will know that word in the month or so (after they learn the word for "fly", and learn how to make diminutives). Through these mechanisms you only need to learn a fraction of vocabulary, since from a root word you can drive many others.

It totally depends on your situation. I said 6 months to be large but it can be closer to 3 if you’re a dedicated learner with a lot of time (like the typical univ student). The trick is to practice with a native speaker from day one, and hear recorded syllables a lot. Optionally one can use Praat to check if their f0 follow the tone contour.

You should be able to produce the correct tone contours by practicing for a few minutes with a teacher who can tell you whether you got it right, assuming you can control the pitch of your voice at all. Maintaining the correct tones during continuous speech is harder, but you can approach that goal by starting slowly and carefully pronouncing each syllable, then speeding up successively.

Recognition does require a good ear, but after 6 months of daily practice, vocabulary is more likely to be the bottleneck. Regularly doing listening exercises and consuming spoken-language content helps (even if you don't actually understand a lot yet).

For an amateur, living at the fringes of both Europe and the Russian empire, I think the boy Zamenhof done good for the 19th century

From a practical perspective - the nearest Uni was St Petersburg - if you had to guess how many comparative grammers of say Russian/Ndebele Russian/Cherokee Russian/Urdu were available in late 19th C Biyalostok? I would go for 0

Yes there are structural reasons that inform Esperanto as a Romance-lexified Western Slavonic - but it is hard to argue that it could be anything but structural - how could Zamenhof personally have chosen different?

Except that Zamenhof spoke Slavic languages as a native - and not German nor English - and specifically chose Romance languages to relexify - there is no discernable German or English influence on the language

English doesn't really have the phonemes spelled ĥ or c in Esperanto (incidentally, these phonemes are also on the rarer side in languages--certainly rarer than aspirated k and the glottal stop, neither of which are phonemic in Esperanto or English).

All the stuff behind Parol is OSS (https://git.io/fjb5n), do bonvolu senti sin libera Esperantigi aferojn :)

Sed li "devis lerni", do mi pensas ke li jam lernis la lingvon de ŝia familio!

Klingon Language Institute has a web page in English, but not in Klingon. That usually does not happen to Esperanto organizations.

Having two books translated to Klingon is impressive. To compare, the library of UEA offers 770 books in Esperanto in category "Translated Prose", and 362 in category "Original Prose". https://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?kateg=prtr https://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?kateg=pror

There is also a Wikipedia in Esperanto, with over 1/4 million articles. Fewer than English with almost 6 million articles, but still more than many languages with millions of native speakers. https://eo.wikipedia.org/

This is why I find the statement about more Klingon speakers than Esperanto speakers very unlikely, whether now or a decade ago. (Klingon Language Institute boasts about growing fast, while Esperanto speakers usually complain about stagnation; which makes it even less likely that the statement would be true a decade ago if it isn't true now.)

Oops... I guess I was thinking about the future too much :)