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Why would I learned a constructed language that only two million people in the world speak when there are other “more useful” languages I could learn?

*cough cough* Spanish.

I’m so glad you asked.

1. Esperanto lets my childhood dreams live.

Esperanto is the closest thing to living out that childhood dream of speaking in a language that only you and your best friend know.

I know I’m one among the many who thought it would be cool to communicate with my childhood friends in a language that only we could understand.

Esperanto is like that.

Minus the fact that none of my friends speak Esperanto.

Minus the fact that this constructed language required no actual linguistic creation from me.

BUT, I digress and you get the point.

2. Esperanto is supposedly mad easy.

Esperanto is so easy you can supposedly be fluent by tomorrow.

Okay, not literally.

However, Esperanto is easy because of a few key features:

Simple grammar

Easy pronunciation

Phonetic writing system

What more could a language learner ask for?

3. Did I mention Esperanto is mad easy?

When Mr. L. L. Zamenhof constructed Esperanto, his aim was “to render the study of the language so easy as to make its acquisition mere play to the learner”.

Easy and play.

Those are two words you don’t hear very often when learning languages.

I take my hat off to Mr. Zamenhof who designed Esperanto to resemble those ideals.

The logical and regular construction of Esperanto gets you out of the tangles of grammar and into fluency, or what feels like fluency, faster than other languages.

4. Learning Esperanto first makes other languages easier to learn.

I’ve heard around the interwebs, that learning Esperanto first makes other languages much easier to learn.

This is especially true with Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, and French).

My man Mr. Zamenhof borrowed heavily from the Romance and Germanic language families.

This makes Esperanto a hearty, melodic concoction of two parts Romance and one part Germanic.

This etymological mixture is probably the reason why Esperanto has a nice balance between sweet sounding vowels found in Romance languages and those harsher constants sound customary to Dutch, German, and English.

Since I plan on learning six languages (AKA as many as possible), it only makes sense to do everything to make the process easier and more fun.

5. Esperanto nurtures my socially conscious side.

Esperanto was created to be a neutral universal language.

Albeit, no language can be neutral because of the sheer number of languages available to compile into one.

Esperanto is heavily influenced by Romance and Germanic languages leaving out Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, and other language families.

This skew already makes Esperanto non-neutral.

Where Esperanto shines is in its aim to be as inclusive and easy as possible.

As an idealist and an optimist, as a lover of words and culture, the idea of a universal language that helps to preserve, not replace, already existing languages and facilitate easy communication sounds like a future I want to be a part of.

How could I ask for more motivation than that?

What do you think?

Let me know your thoughts and feelings about Esperanto.

Does it hold its own as a neutral, universal language?

Are there more viable options out there that I don’t know of? Let me know.

Hasta luego!

Tschüss!

Tchau!

À plus tard!

Adiaŭ!

Ciao!