It’s a little late for first impressions – I’ve been at Esperanto for two weeks! – but I didn’t end up posting my first impressions last week like I planned.

My goal has been 2 skills a day on Duolingo. Esperanto is currently the shortest course on Duolingo by number of skills, with a total of 43. That will put me comfortably finishing the course well before the end of the month. I’m a couple of days behind on my skills, but am catching up to where I am supposed to be pretty quickly. I’m nowhere near the talented lady who finished the course in 3 days. But even with my limited studying, it’s relatively easy to follow this interview (same lady, after 6 days of learning).

My initial thoughts on Esperanto are:

It sounds like Italian. I don’t speak Italian (yet!), but just hearing the flow of Esperanto reminds me of Italian. I think it’s all those “o” and “a” endings that does it. Some parts are as easy as I thought. Like, all nouns end in -o, all present tense verbs end in -as, all adjectives end in -a and all adverbs end in -e. Consistency is so great. Overall, it’s a bit more difficult than I thought it would be. Probably because I imagined Esperanto as slightly advanced Pig Latin. Which is silly, of course – Esperanto is far more complex than Pig Latin. But some things keep tripping me up. Like how female versions of male words have an “-ino” ending instead of an “-o.” ending. So patro is father and patrino is mother. Somehow, patrino just doesn’t sound like a female parent to me. Maybe it’s my study of Spanish, but I really want to say patra for mother. An -a ending just sounds much more feminine (as arbitrary as that is). One thing that really got me is the naming conventions for countries and nationalities. Whatever inspired the creator of Esperanto to create different naming conventions for “Old World” and “New World” countries?? That is just unnecessarily complicated. There seem to be a disproportionate amount of French-inspired words (especially in categories like the days of the week!). I would really love if Duolingo had some notes on where each word came from (as in, which language inspired it). I can recognize the basis for most words (for example, tag (day) is like tag in German, diras (to say) is like dire in French, vesperon (evening) is like vesperum in Latin). But where does iomete (a little) come from?