The World’s Most Efficient Languages (2016)

There are many Esperanto communities around the net, podcasts, radios, zoom meetings etc. But I want to tell you about an alternative, Interlingua (IALA) which is a pan-romance conlang designed for "comprende a prima vista". I've been learning it for some time now, and while I progress in Spanish and Latin (using Lingua Latina per se illustrata to self study) the basis I hold from Interlingua really helped me in grokking the two linguas materne... And actually a Galician professor has been in the news for going viral on TikTok speaking and writing only Interlingua to the millions of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian speakers [0]. It's a fairly interesting language, and easy to grasp for English speakers I think since most of the Latinate spelling are really similar to English rendition of them (but pronounced regularly like Italian or Spanish).

For Toki Pona, it's a really interesting language. I should dedicate some time to learn it... A minimal language that can endlessly be extended as long as your speaking partner understand your terms. That's an intriguing prospect.

[0] https://www.dailydot.com/debug/interlingua-tiktok/ [1] https://www.tiktok.com/discover/interlingua?lang=es

No. It's a cool experiment, but I would say the project as it was envisioned is mostly dead. It's well over 100 years old.

However, there is still an interesting idea about teaching it to school children as a first second language, because it's so well structured and easy to pick up that kids can start actually using it very quickly. The idea is that it primes the brain to be ready for more than one language, which is the steepest part of the multilingual learning curve. There's an exponential decay to the challenge of learning the n+1 language.

But what you're telling me about Toki Pona is that it might actually be better suited for that. If a classroom full of kids could be conversant in a second language after just a few weeks or months of instruction, that would achieve this goal much more efficiently.

Strangely enough, I feel Esperanto is more similar to smaller natural languages. My experience with Esperanto is similar to my experience with Belarusian.

Although my great-grandmother spoke Belarusian as her first language, this transmission was broken. My grandmother already spoke Russian to my mother, and we spoke Russian in my family. I learnt Belarusian in school and then started using it to express my Belarusian identity, to speak with a community of like-minded people.

I've learnt Esperanto when I emigrated. I wanted to find friends in my new country, my new city had an Esperanto community, and this was the reason I've learnt Esperanto. This worked for me :D

Like with Belarusian in Belarus, in Esperanto you don't talk everywhere. You have special times and places; outside them, you speak other languages.

Like with Belarusian, you have rather limited number of books available. So, if in Russian or English I mostly read fantasy, in Belarusian and Esperanto I read a much wider variety of genres, because there's just not enough books to commit to one or two genres.

So, while Esperanto didn't become an international competitor to English, it became a nice small homely language for speaking to friends. Not exactly what the Zamenhof envisioned, but still nice.

If you want to give Esperanto a try, here is a good website to learn it: https://lernu.net/

Here is a collection of some music in Esperanto: https://dvd.ikso.net/pagxo/en/muziko.html