In my opinion, Esperanto really needs to pitch itself as "the language to learn any other language." Once you get the training techniques in esperano, you get the confidence to learning any other European language. Studies have shown that learning esperanto first helps speed up the learning other languages, so as a prerequisite prior to learning English, Spanish or other European languages, it could really incentivize others to learn Esperanto as an avenue for better and faster language comprehension.
Precisely. And not only European languages: at a deeper level, Esperanto has much in common with agglutinating languages like Turkish, and isolating languages like Mandarin Chinese.
Facebook apparently isn´t willing to disclose how many of its users list Esperanto as one of their languages. Wikipedia says that Vikipedio has 590.000 unique visitors a month
Saluton el mezlernejo Almenara en Vélez-Málaga!! (Hispanio) la unua eduka centro kie oni povas oficiale lerni Esperanton. Esperanto povus esti bonegan ponton inter Azio kaj Okcidento.
Dankon por bonega filmeto pri Esperanto. Malgrau tiu estas konstruita linngva, Esperanto estas suficxe funkcia. Ecx pli tiu estas subtaksita. Vere. Kaj tiu helpas multe lerni aliajn lingvojn cxar post lernado Esperanton oni povas pli facile kaj rapide gajni vortprovizon, ekzemple, kiam oni lernas la francan.
I think Esperanto lacks power because some of our espersnto speakers aren't active. If you are wondering why Christianity spreads and so as islam because the followers are active. If only we Esperantists are more active. Not only learning the language but also promoting it.
Do you think that 1) it would be possible to incorporate some Asian language influence into Esperanto? and 2) do you think that doing so would make Esperanto closer to achieving its goal of being globally accessible? For me, I feel like it would certainly be helpful, but it’s hard to pin point which aspects would make it familiar enough to the different speakers. For example, Hangul as the writing system would be familiar to most people especially Chinese speakers since it forms phonetic blocks of sound into squares rather than a string of “letters” such as hiragana or Vietnamese; and it’s one of the smallest and intuitive alphabets there is, so it would be quick to learn for even people who have already learned the current Esperanto writing system or other Latin based languages. And then, maintaining some tonal aspects of Chinese and Vietnamese would help keep the contextual integrity of certain words that have different meanings even though they phonetically sound the same, depending on how you emphasize them; this would maintain the familiarity for Vietnamese and Chinese speakers. So, perhaps finding a way to include tone markers from Vietnamese to the Hangul would be helpful for Chinese speakers to recognize. And when it comes to vocabulary itself, there could be a combination of all languages such as Tagalog, Indonesian, Japanese, Thai, etc… probably using whichever words are the most overlapped in use or utilization across Asia; maybe even some borrowed words from English such as “컴퓨터“ (literally “computer” in Korean) or “そす“ (literally “sauce” in Japanese) which would maintain familiarity to English speakers, and keeping that “globally accessible” essence Esperanto has. So many ideas, but no ability to implement them 😭
You just heard an Asian speaker of Esperanto list all the pros and cons as she sees them. Eurocentrism was not a factor she mentioned. Over and over I see anglophones say Esperanto isn't accessable to Asian learners. It doesn't hold up.
Any language mixture will be criticised as unbalanced and unjust. But already years ago I had myself the idea to replace al esperantic three-syllable roots and some (or all) two-syllable roots by one-syllable chinese, basque, kartvelian, nahuatl, mayan and tamazight ones with the goal of reducing the amount of lengthy roots. Esperanto has a quite rich consonantic system (as compared to most other planned auxlangs) and a not so simple phonotactic system. This allows in principle for shorter roots (as many more combinations of phonemes are possible as compared to e.g. Interlingua, Volapük, Neo, Idiom Neutral, Loglan, Lidepla, Kotava etc.) and therefore multy-syllable-roots are not really necessary in Esperanto. To reduce the already existing level of homophony I even split existing roots into several new ones. That said, I still tried to stick with the Fundamento, according to the rules given by Zamenhof, that means: creating "necessary" new roots is allowed, but all about 3000 roots presented in the Universala Vortaro and the 16 rules will always be correct Esperanto and can be used forever. This makes, the new roots are an add-on (like 80% of all roots nowadays used and presented in e.g. the PIV).
And yes, for all speakers of languages having a simpler phonotactical system than Esperanto has, like Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian etc., the pronunciation of Esperanto is a hurdle. But languages with a very reduced phonetic system and avoiding clusters of consonants have a large drawback: they will have much more homonyms and many words will sound alike. Moreover, they are uncapable to serve as science languages when it comes to unambiguous naming of zillions of scientific names of plants and animals or the nomenclature of chemistry without making very long names. That is especially true for the languages mentioned, and for many conlangs, especially visible regarding Volapük or Tokipona. Esperanto is not the most easy to pronounce conlang, it is a balanced language with medium pronunciation difficulty. However, this enables the language to serve for any purpose, while some conlangs cannot do this with the same ease or at all.
Esperanto is globally accessible today. And English, the globally most used auxlang, is phonetically not easier (it has 12 phonemic vowels, Esperanto has five), its grammar is 50 times more complex, and it has one of the worst orthographies of the world. We have seen more than 2000 auxlangs created between 1850 and today. Many tried to make easier auxlangs than Esperanto. They failed, because the langs being really easier to learn have reduced sound systems and reduced vocabulary, making them incapable to meet the requirement: being the same expressive as the most expressive natural languages are. Esperanto can do that while saving a lot of learning time. Languages saving you even more learning time, like, Basic English or Tokipona, cannot. And langs like Interlingua are essentially simplified Spanish and thus even way more non-neutral than Esperanto without delivering any advantage to Asian people.
I always say this in videos like this one, but I'm sure the major problem of Esperanto is the lack of good content. Like, where are the movies in Esperanto? Where are the games? The animes? The vlogs? For god's sake, where's the fcking p0rn in Esperanto?!?!?! People talk too much about Esperanto, but don't actually use the language to make things that the younger generation is going to enjoy. Most books in Esperanto are stuff written more than a century ago, young people just don't care about that. My only use for Esperanto as for now is listening to a channel that narrates creepypasta, Kolekto de Herkso. That's the type of media we need to promote the language.
Still, both languages have very few speakers, and way less than Esperanto. Elbish langs, and specially Sindarin, show a severe mismatch between popularity (and Sindarin's preferred script type, Tengwar, the most beautiful alphabet ever) and real usage as a means of communication between fans. Most fans like to talk _about_ it, mainly in English, but not by using it.
I think there arent much rational reasons to lern Esperanto ! I think that Esperanto speakers are hard to find ! Maybe even Latin speakers are more easy to find , most likely in academia and catholic churches ! I think Esperanto wouldnt be on a top 4 most rational languages to lern list! I think there are even not so much non rational reasons to lern it as well most languages are based of real cultures ,Esperanto hase just a subculture.
