Archive for the ‘Esperanto’ Category

Esperanto, a first look

Since choosing to become an active member of the language blogging community, I have started seing Esperanto mentioned a lot. While I have had some basic understanding of what Esperanto is, I didn’t really know any details about it. After seeing it mentioned a few times in response to last week’s post about reasons to learn Spanish, I decided to take a little time to discover what Esperanto is about.

Fluent in one week? The Esperanto challenge!

While looking into the rudiments of Esperanto on a bit of a weekend whim, I tweeted, somewhat jestfully, that I could imagine someone being able to acheive fluency in Esperanto in one week. That remark was met with a friendly challenge and even a starting point, and so I’ve decided to give it a try.

Prepositions, prefixes and suffixes – the power of Esperanto!

Saluton esperantistoj! Today I will outline the concepts of prepositions, prefixes, and suffixes — essential concepts in the language of Esperanto.

Asking and answering questions in Esperanto

In addition to understanding the agglunative way vocabulary is formed in Esperanto, I’m also going to need to know how to ask and answer questions if I have any hope of becoming fluent in one week. So today, we’ll look at Esperanto’s table of correllatives.

Connections, conjunctions, and conversational glue for Esperantists!

Sooner or later, on the path to fluency, you have to cross the bridge from simple subject-verb-object statements and questions to complex descriptions of causes and comparisons. Today I want to cross that bridge in Esperanto.

The internet is your reality simulator

The internet is full of potential for use in endless unexpected ways. Today, we’re going to talk about two uses which are really not terribly amazing, but which are incredibly useful to the language learner.

Esperanto one week later – am I fluent?

One week ago, after taking a brief look at Esperanto, I made the comment that it looks so easy that I could see how it’s possible to be fluent in one week, which led to my one-week Esperanto challenge. Now, one week later, how did it turn out? Am I fluent?

Some additional thoughts on Esperanto

My recent challenge to become fluent in Esperanto in one week seems to have drawn a lot of attention. What’s most interesting to me, though, is that the majority of the feedback I’ve received has been in regard to my disappointment in the language and its community, rather than my learning style or my results.

Five failures of Esperanto

Okay, I know I’ve said Esperanto is more religion than language, and I’ve complained about how few people there are with whom to use Esperanto. But today I’m going to put aside those biases and bring attention to a few specific details of Esperanto which give me an unfavorable opinion of it as a language.…