Yes, you saw that title right. This is actually day 5 of Esperanto for me. Umm…what? Wasn’t I supposed to start on September 1? The answer is, yes, I was supposed to start today (September 1). But this past Sunday I was sitting at my favorite local coffeeshop, doing some studying and reading, dreaming of the Esperanto to come. And my computer was right there and it would be so easy to just do one Esperanto lesson on Duolingo. And I cracked. I started Esperanto early. I regret nothing!

So what’s got me so excited about Esperanto? Some of it is just new language anticipation (I think I’m addicted to new languages). Some of it is excitement over a language that is far easier to pick up/learn than Korean (I adore Korean, but sometimes it’s nice to take a bit of a break). But a lot of it is a recent fascination with this constructed language.

A year ago, I didn’t even consider learning Esperanto. Then it got added to Duolingo. I am a little bit of a completist, and I have a sick urge to do every single Duolingo course (does that mean I will one day be studying Klingon, which is currently lingering in the incubator? Gosh, who even knows). So Esperanto started entering my thoughts. The course is so short…it’s supposed to be so easy…doooo it. But I was still on the fence.

But the more I learned about Esperanto, the more intrigued I became. Here are the reasons I’m excited about Esperanto:

Reason #1: It’s quick & easy! – I love Korean and it’s complexity. But I’ve been looking forward to the (relative!) brain break that is Esperanto. Easy pronunciation. Uniform rules. Lots and lots of cognates (especially since I’ve studied French, Spanish, German, Latin, and Russian to various degrees – so more words look familiar to me than if I just knew English). And it’s only supposed to take 150 hours to get to the same level of fluency as 2,000 hours of German (so says lindsayloveslanguages…I didn’t fact check this one)

Reason #2: Learning Esperanto helps you learn other languages –There are studies that one year of Esperanto improves a student’s ability to learn a target language more than if the student only learned the target language. Tim Morley has a fascinating TED talk about this. Benny the Irish polyglot is also an advocate of learning Esperanto to aid future language acquisition. It’s the recorder theory: schools teach students the recorder not because they hope one day the kids will master the recorder. The recorder is just a simple instrument that’s being used as a stepping stone to future, more complex instruments. (This is not my original analogy – it’s on the wikipedia page!). While Esperanto won’t be my first foreign language, I’m interested to see if its simplification of the rules will help me internalize language rules better (like using the accusative case! cases are my language nemesis). Plus, maybe its cross-over with European languages will give small boosts to my European language studies.

Reason #3: The Esperanto community appears very vibrant– There are Esperanto speakers all over the world and everything I’ve seen gives the impression that it’s a friendly and enthusiastic community. There’s even a couch-surfing service for Esperanto speakers called Pasporta Servo.

Reason #4: It’s a constructed language – One of the things that intrigues me about language learning is the different structures in language. Are there genders? Are there cases? What’s the word order? I think it will be interesting to explore what someone else’s idea of an ideal universal language looks like. What did they include? What did they exclude? How do all the pieces of the language fit together?