Mi studas esperanton

I am learning Esperanto.

For those who have never heard of this, or you think you have and you're pretty sure it's a caffeinated beverage: Esperanto is a constructed language, originally developed in the late 19th century with the intention that it be a universal second language, and the lofty ambition that it would thus foster peace and understanding throughout the world. That might be a bit much, but at least it would be a language with which everyone could understand each other, without anyone being forced to learn someone else's language.


And it's way easier than learning someone else's language: it's said Esperanto can be learned in 1/8 the time of another language. It's based on a relatively limited number of root words and a system of prefixes and suffixes that change meaning (for example: granda is big, malgranda is little). There are no irregular verbs. Tone does not change meaning. Pronunciation is uniform (but also flexible).

The number of speakers worldwide is estimated to be somewhere between 100 thousand and two million (no idea how they got that big a range). But they're really excited about it. They have websites, blogs, and even conferences. And there's a network of Esperanto speakers happy to host travelers who also speak the language.

In person, to my knowledge, I've only met one person who speaks Esperanto. He came to my school to talk about world federalism; he spoke Esperanto because of his conviction that people should speak Esperanto.

I'm not doing it out of idealism, though. Let me back up a bit.

A few months back, I decided I was going to learn French. So I downloaded Duolingo and started learning French.

I. Hate. French.

I really struggled. Couldn't pronounce anything, couldn't understand anything, couldn't remember anything five minutes after I closed a lesson. And this from someone who speaks Spanish fluently and thought his class in biblical Greek "wasn't that hard."

Because I have no discipline and refuse to do anything hard, I gave up. But that itch of wanting to learn a language stayed with me. This ties in to my desire to do some intentional "experiments with truth" (basically just taking on projects/disciplines/learning experiences intentionally, in time-bound periods), which I will blog about at a later time. No, really, I will. But ultimately here are the reasons I'm doing this:

1. It's fun. It might be a useless skill, but I'm enjoying learning it, and it makes me feel better about myself than my other go-to hobbies (watching TV and playing video games).
2. Studies show Esperanto aids in the learning of other languages. One study had one group study Esperanto for six months and then French for a year and a half; the other group studied French for the whole two years. At the end of the two years, the group that studied Esperanto first was better at French. This is probably most applicable to people who have not learned even a second language, but I did find anecdotal evidence that people found Esperanto, even as a third or fourth language, to be helpful in learning additional languages.
3. I want a secret language so I can talk with my spouse and others won't know what we're saying. It should be noted that my spouse is not currently on board with this, and I will happily share this secret language with anyone else nerdy enough to learn it. But Spanish doesn't cut it for this purpose, since let's face it, pretty much everyone understands Spanish these days.

Right now I'm enjoying this too much to need any kind of disciplined study schedule, but I'm going to feel it out and see how it goes. In the meantime... comment. Talk about your experience learning language... or something. I don't know. I want to make this a living blog.

More later.

-N