Living in los Estados Unidos de 2016, there has been never more opportunity and appeal in trying to speak Spanish. Spanish comes to you when you press “2” on the phone; Hispanophones can be heard every morning on lawns and construction sites; and the country is gripped in severe His-panic about economic and demographic trends.

On the flipside, it is totally possible to live a convenient and rich life in the United States while only speaking English. So, most of our language learning as Americans comes à la carte. In secondary school, language learning is mandatory. But as with math, it is poorly and impractically taught, to be forgotten completely when students have a choice of what to study.

And I don’t blame people who resist, or have given up on, Spanish. There is a humiliating sense of displacement associated with learning someone else’s native language. North Americans, British Islanders and Australasians are blind to being on the other side of this power dynamic, because we can travel around the world and have upwardly-mobile natives eagerly try to speak to us in our native language.

Even if we don’t laugh at their mistakes; even if we don’t condescend to them in baby-talk; even if we don’t gesticulate to them as if they were blind—but let’s be real, Anglophones do these things all the time — most non-native speakers of English will never achieve a level of fluency to be able to banter with us on an equitable level. Is there a fairer and easier option than the slow conquest of English the world-over?

People who obsess about social justice clearly find a sadistic pleasure in the struggle of White Americans to learn Spanish. It is the same base instinct for revenge that brought thousands of people to the guillotine; to the gulag; and to other ugly places of history, and actually does not represent any sort of justice for America’s indigenes. Spanish is just a slightly different language from perhaps better-tanned but still European-descended conquerors.

Esperanto has almost the complete opposite ethos to those colonial languages of English and Spanish. Its speakers are geographically dispersed, but not concentrated; they are multilingual, and learned the language voluntarily; and Esperantists are in the main, extremely open to intercultural exchange. Two people speaking to each other in Esperanto are on forgiving, equal ground.

As a planned language with an extremely regular grammar, stealing from widely-recognized international scientific vocabulary, Esperanto is fun and easy to learn. These properties matter because motivation is extremely important to learning a language. People make such amazing progress in Esperanto so quickly that they unseat previously held beliefs about themselves like, “I cannot learn a foreign language on my own”.

Because of this motivational boost that can come from learning Esperanto, as well as its ability to teach people habits like persistence that lead to success in language learning, Esperanto is often thought of as “a first step” towards some more subjectively more valuable language. Indeed, I may very well end up learning some Spanish in the future. It would be a shame to drop Esperanto, though: what you can do with it is a serious bargain for the time commitment.

But because of the potential for confusion between the two languages, the answer to someone with knowledge of neither, to “Should I learn Esperanto or Spanish?” is ideally not “both at the same time”. You probably don’t have that much free time in your life, anyway. Neither do I support the attitude of treating Esperanto as a stepping stone towards Spanish, because of the wildly differing philosophies of their speech communities, as I mentioned earlier.

If you are an American in particular, or I guess an Anglophone in general, it is your choice whether or not you learn Spanish (or Chinese, or Fusha, or whatever “practical” language is in vogue). If you choose to learn Spanish, be enthusiastic about and fully committed towards your choice. Swallow your pride and endure maltreatment from native speakers—practicing with them is the only way to attain semi-fluency in such an irregular language.

If you choose to explore Esperanto instead, you may soon find yourself in a cosmopolitan community of very friendly, interesting, and non-chauvinistic people. If you are monolingual but sensitive to the power dynamics of language, then learning Esperanto might be worth it for that education in it. Or, maybe you’re just interested in languages in general! My point is: you don’t have to learn Spanish.