What people miss is that, even though Esperanto is more difficult for an Asian Language Speaker to learn than it would be for a European Language Speaker to learn, it's still leagues easier to learn for them than most other European Languages, making it a great tool to introduce those individuals to other European Languages. Plus it's word building and affixes makes it incredibly reminiscent of an Isolating Language such as Chinese (because Esperanto is an Isolating Language and not a Transitive Language, despite what Wikipedia says. Claude Pirion has an excellent write up about the phenomenon)
A fluent Esperanto speaker here. Esperanto doesn't have only 16 rules. It's easy and fast to learn but 16 grammatical rules would be too little. PMEG - the complete grammar book - is rather tight.
Mi ankaŭ estas flua Esperanto-parolanto. Mi povas diri ke Esperanto estas unu el la plej facilaj lingvoj en la mondo sed jen multaj lingoj ke estas pli facilaj ol Esperanto kiel : Tokipono, Lingua Franca Nova, Ido.
@@SealInDisguise about 18 months or more to follow Evildea without subtitles. Two years to feel mostly confident and fluent. You'll feel like you're getting it almost right away. After 6mo or so, (some can do so in much less,) you can hold a normal polite conversation. Much longer to feel comfortable arguing politics.
@@fanaticofmetaljes estas vere, ke Esperanto estas multe pli facile lernebla kaj mi scivolas kial ne estas multe da informoj pri kaj Esperanto kaj IDO
I would say that now adays most speakers are in the Europe and the DRC (in africa). There are monuments and an Esperanto museum in China but the popularity there has decreased somewhat. At least hundreds of speakers still though
@@TVwriter23 i mean afrikaans is big in africa and its an offshoot of dutch from dutch colonization and forced cultural erasure/assimilation so i guess learning a eurocentric language would be easier for afrikaans speakers
The grammar has a few slavic elements in it, but many features from other languages too. The way the words for numbers are made is identical to the way it works in Chinese and Japanese for example, not at all like French or Russian.
Not if you speak Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Tamil. The vocabulary is different but the agglutination and how you derive words from roots all have the same premise as the languages above.
Honestly, I've been toying around with a few existing scripts for it and the language could work really well with Cyrillic with very minimal changes. You could also maybe adapt a Yiddish-based orthography, as well as an Armenian, Devanagari (or other Indic scripts), Coptic, Tifinagh, and maybe a Syriac, Arabic and Korean-based script, with the last 3 requiring a bit more creativity. Greek would need to add more letters, so wouldn't be useful when texting online. Then of course you can make your own script or utilise another script, either real like the ones I mentioned or dictional like Tengwar, which I think has been done
@@AlenaFenomena Esperanto critics: Esperanto is too similar to other languages -- it needs its own, unique writing system. Also Esperanto critics: Esperanto isn't similar enough to other languages -- it needs to get rid of any letters that aren't already in the English or French alphabets.
Though it is quite European influenced, that didn’t stop many Japanese people from learning Esperanto in the 30s and 40s and their esperantista klubo. Just shows how much Esperanto brings people together!
I had a teacher who downright hated Esperanto. I asked him why, and his response was Esperanto was too Eurocentric and it tried to be the international language, which degrades speakers of other non European languages. I then saw a topic for essays he wanted to give the class and he encouraged this one: 'Why English should be the official international WORLD language?' This individual was an English teacher by the way. In Summary: Esperanto was too European, but English should be the official international world language. RIIIIIIGHT!
@@alanguages Recently, I’ve noticed that people who hate Esperanto are almost always imperialist, antisemitic, etc. Just keep talking to them, they’ll say some stupid shit eventually lmao
@@kinny6823 I disagree on the descriptions you gave about people who hate Esperanto. Those are extremely inflammatory remarks you wrote down, with no true basis. I find Anti- Esperantist individuals to be ignorant and refuse to find out the facts about Esperanto and the benefits it provides. Yeah, they say stupid things, because they wallow in their ignorance.
@@alanguages Exactly! They usually don’t know the facts. And so, personally, I find that people usually say false things like how Esperanto was made by the “communists” and “pedophiles” (yes, someone actually told me this). These are just some replacement words Nazis use since they can’t say “Jewish”, which will give away their identity. I’ve heard it all lol
The one time I went to an Universala Kongreso, decades ago, I met a young Japanese man who told me (in fluent Esperanto) that he had studied English in school for some years and never 'got' it, but had learned Esperanto in far less time. "I don't speak English good," he added in English.
I love Esperanto! I'm currently learning standard Esperanto, but I know a dialect of it which I'd argue is somehow more complex than Esperanto itself. I hope to be fluent in Esperanto one day as it still takes awhile to learn even if it's easy to learn in comparison to other languages! Mi amas Esperanton! Esperanto estas lingvo bona!
Same! Esperanto is very easy to learn but still takes awhile to learn! I don't like some aspects of it and the accent marks can't always be typed they have to be copy and pasted... but besides those I love Esperanto! I swear I'm the only person who keeps saying virono when trying to speak standard even though in standard it's viro.
@@dwes6447 I think people learn Esperanto. To get an understanding of other languages and can be useful if you find someone who use it. I think if it's not even use, it would be easy to learn and could be use to learn other languages that has connect to Esperanto within a couple of years.
@@keagaming9837 I think I meant that it is overly influenced by those two languages. No way I forgot the English, French, and Greek influence. The entire language is only based on European languages.
I wonder if there’s been any attempt to add Asian aspects to Esperanto as to make it more familiar to Asian people (I know that includes India, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines and not just Korea, Japan, and China). Like there has to be SOME way we can make this a more globally accessible language. It’s already so close!!
Been speaking Esperanto for decades. The many Asian speakers of Esperanto I've asked about this have told me the same story... the grammar is so accessible to them that they have plenty of bandwidth to learn the vocab. Non-issue, for every one of them.
@@AlenaFenomena plus a lot of the grammar structure is similar to Chinese in terms of noun grouping derivations and agglutination like Korean, Japanese, and Tamil
@@chrispbacon3042 It generally takes Asian students about six months, to get to the point that Europeans get to in about six weeks (Europeans have a big head start in vocabulary, and likely alphabet) but after that, they seem to do about as well. (In some respects they do better, because they're less likely to make "eurocentric" errors that come from mistakenly assuming something is just like in a familiar, european language.)
I really really like languages but I'm always bummed by how hard they are to learn because of my mental disabilities, but I love poking around at Esperanto and I even kind of like the fact that it has a lot of European influence in it's language because it's just kinda neat to learn words and see how easy they correlate back to English.
I have kind of the same "problem" and it's definitely harder for people like us to learn compared to other people but we can be even more proud as a result. I hope you have fun learning languages!
Don't let anything hold you back. Whatever mental or intellectual challenges you face, the practice of learning a language is itself great for your mind. The fact that you would still put the effort into learning another language, despite the difficulties, is a sign of intelligence. Even if learning languages isn't your thing, that process of learning may reveal what your true skills and talents are.
Agreed! I don't think it's a bad thing that it's Eurocentric, it allows for even easier European translation and a gateway to other European languages. My main problems are the accent marks and also the gender neutral words and masculine words are differentiated by context. I think Weh Esperanto has made it harder for me to learn standard Esperanto. I keep saying virono instead of viro, to me viro means adult not man/XY adult... so many other false friend words too.
I'm in with you I have a disability to learn a new subject, but im in with you. As a college student I will work on myself and learn something out of my league. Let's do this together my brothers and sister.
I honestly don't understand the common criticism about it being "too eurocentric", do these people even know how many countries in the world officially speak at least one European language??? Have you ever seen a map of English, Spanish and French colonies and ex-colonies? Do you know how many people in the world speak English, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese or even Russian? All of them are European languages and people all over the world speak at least one of them. so Esperanto CAN actually be considered an international language. The creator of the language knew about the immense amount of countries that were influenced by European countries in some way or another. So this criticism is far from being valid. And ironically, Chinese, Korean and Japanese people are the most willing to learn this specific language due to its simplicity and lack of complexity.
Esperanto or another invented better should be established as the only official language in all international forums. It's enough that native English speakers are born with privileges over others!!!
Ok then make Spanish the universal language. Lots of people already speak it. Making up a new language to put literally everyone at a disadvantage is stupid.
@@danelisslow3269 Se podía hacer una versión simplificada del español. Quitando las conjugaciones, el género y las tildes, quedaría el idioma más fácil del mundo, tanto para hablar como para escribir. Hablar en inglés es mucho más complicado y su correspondiente escritura no tiene solución simple.
@@danelisslow3269Idk about the original poster but it's not just about "putting one group at disadvantage rather than other". If that was the case, we should just go with Mandarin or something. But as stated in this video, Esperanto is really easy grammatically (no exceptions from rules) and at least from a European point of view, a lot of vocabulary is rather intuitive. It's actually said that it takes 2-3 times less time to become fluent in Esperanto than it takes to become fluent in other languages. One of my favorite examples of how easy the grammar is so far (I'm learning it but I'm still at A1 level): adjectives and adverbs. - they end with -a - if there are opposites, they're paired. So "longa" = long, "mallonga" = short. "juna" = young, "maljuna" = old. Just add mal- and you can kinda half the amount of adjectives to learn (although not every adjective has an opposite, I suppose). - adverbs end with -e instead. "bela" = beautiful, "bele" = beautifully. - "pli" is more, "la plej" is the most. The adjective/adverb doesn't change, unlike in English. "bona" = good, "pli bona" = better, "la plej bona" = the best. In English, shorter adjectives get a suffix, while longer get the supporting words (more/most). From what I can tell, they also tie in with some verbs pretty neatly. For example, instead of saying "mi estas laca" (I'm tired), you can say "mi lacas" - in a way, the adjective "laca" becomes a verb, and "estas" - "am" is dropped.
The grammar slavic? Absolutely not, the grammar is Greek(more precisely Ancient Greek) and many aspects were borrowed from it including the Accusative ending in -n, the participles in -nt and -t and borrowed vocabulary like Filozofio (Philosophy) Geografio (Geography) and a lot more.
Se podía hacer una versión simplificada del español. Quitando las conjugaciones, el género y las tildes, quedaría el idioma más fácil del mundo, tanto para hablar como para escribir.
The sounds in esperanto are the same as those polish at the time the language was created, which means speakers of most languages will need to learn at least one new sound
It's very unusual for a speaker of one particular language to be able to learn another particular language without having to learn at least a few new sounds. For example, even though English is largely descended from French and German roots, English-speaking students nonetheless still have to learn new sounds when learning French or German (and vice versa). If someone is unwilling to learn new sounds, they're not actually serious about learning to speak another language.
@@bernardkung7306 Esperanto is not a natural language. It was created with the intention of being able to learn easily no matter your native language so it can be used by everyone. Making people learn new sounds makes it harder to learn for people who don't know a language with that sound and easier for those who do, and if your language has the phonology of Polish (from the time the language was created), many people will have to learn new sounds
@@aer0a Why don't you look into how many sounds would be left, if you got rid of every phoneme that some language 9or even language group) would find unfamiliar? I don't think you would care for the result. PS: It's funny how people complain about Esperanto's supposedly Polish phonology, even though Zamenhof's own "mother tongue" languages were actually Russian and Yiddish. (Russian was the everyday language of the Zamenhof household, that Zamenhof grew up in.)
@@bernardkung7306 You could at least remove sounds that some of the most common languages wouldn't have like the /x/ sound, which isn't in English (spoken by more than one billion people). Also, if you compare the two languages, Esperanto and Polish share quite a few sounds; his native language not being Polish doesn't mean a language he created can't have a phonology similar to Polish
@@bernardkung7306his first language in the household was Yiddish. The second according to some biographers was Polish, other say it was Russian. Also, in the elementary and high school language of the courses was Polish
Anti Esperantists when they realise there are 250 thousand Esperanto speakers in China, making it the largest Esperanto community out of any country (suddenly it's not so eurocentric)
@@aer0a This same country literally has Esperanto as an optional language in the educational system. The only other one is Hungary Guess who's also not a European language? Hungarian
No, as an Esperanto learner I can confirm that this is not true! I know a dialect of Esperanto that's supposed to be closer to Spanish too and even then it's pretty far off from Spanish! Don't let "estas" fool you!
