Esperanto · Curriculum
The Esperanto curriculum, start to finish.
31 chapters, 664 lessons. A new band of the 3,000 most common words every hundred ranks, the grammar that turns those words into sentences woven in, and a graded reader closing each chapter that you can read using only what you have learned so far.
- 31
- Chapters
- 664
- Lessons
- 66
- Grammar primers
- 30
- Story milestones
The free frequency-first Esperanto course: the 1,000 most common words in order, all forty affixes as a dedicated track, audio in two accents on every word, and no irregular verbs to memorise because the language does not have any.
Is Esperanto hard, and how long does it take? Read first.
Is Esperanto hard to learn?
No, and not in a hand-waving way. Esperanto has sixteen grammar rules and no exceptions to them: every noun ends in -o, every adjective in -a, and every verb tense has one ending that never changes for person or number. There are no irregular verbs and no grammatical gender, and spelling is perfectly phonemic, so a word is pronounced exactly as written. Most learners read simple prose within weeks rather than years.
How long does it take to learn Esperanto?
Estimates put Esperanto at somewhere between a third and a tenth of the hours a natural language needs - roughly 150-200 hours to comfortable conversation, against 600-750 for Spanish or French. The honest version: the grammar is genuinely finished in an afternoon, and everything after that is vocabulary. This Esperanto course orders all 1,000 of its words by real corpus frequency, because that is where the leverage is.
Why an Esperanto course should count roots, not words
Esperanto builds words from roots plus affixes, so the root bon- gives you bona (good), bono (goodness), bone (well), boni (to be good), malbona (bad) and plibonigi (to improve). Learning the root is learning the family. That is why this course teaches all forty official affixes as a dedicated track alongside the vocabulary: a 1,000-word Esperanto vocabulary built that way behaves like several thousand words of French.
How this course compares with lernu and Duolingo
lernu.net is the community's own portal - free, multilingual and a good doorway to actual speakers, though not frequency-ordered. Duolingo's Esperanto course launched in 2015 but has been effectively unmaintained since the volunteer programme that built it wound down. This course is also free, and it is built on the things the others skip: strict frequency order, recorded audio in two accents on every word, the affix system taught deliberately, and graded readers with enforced vocabulary ceilings closing every chapter.
Is Esperanto worth learning?
As a first foreign language for an English speaker there is a real argument for it. Work on the propaedeutic effect suggests time spent on Esperanto first can leave learners further ahead in a second language than spending all of it on that language directly. Whether or not you accept the strong version of that claim, the weaker one is uncontroversial: Esperanto is where you learn what cases, aspect and word building feel like without also fighting irregular verbs.
The chapters
What you can do when you finish
- Read the rank-3,000 graded reader at the end with no lookups - every content word is from the chapters you just worked through.
- Hold a present-and-past tense conversation: ask questions, talk about routines, narrate what happened yesterday.
- Hedge a request politely, follow everyday speech, and recognise the core grammar that turns vocabulary into sentences.
- Cover the 3,000 most frequent words - roughly 80% of everyday speech by the frequency curve.
Esperanto learning: common questions
Frequently asked
How many people speak Esperanto?
Estimates run from tens of thousands of fluent speakers to around two million with some competence, and the honest answer is that nobody knows precisely. There are perhaps a thousand native speakers, children raised in Esperanto-speaking households. It is small, and it is also the most widely spoken constructed language by a very large margin.
Where is Esperanto spoken?
Nowhere and everywhere: it has no territory by design. In practice the community is strongest in central and eastern Europe, Brazil, China and Japan, and it lives through congresses, local clubs and a great deal of online activity.
Can Esperanto help me learn other languages?
That is the propaedeutic argument, and it is why a lot of people start. Esperanto teaches the machinery - the accusative case, verb aspect, building words from parts - in a system with no exceptions, so when you meet the same ideas in Spanish or German you are learning one hard thing rather than two.
Is Esperanto a real language?
Yes. It has native speakers, original literature, translated classics, poetry written in it rather than into it, and a community that has argued about correct usage for over a century. Constructed is not the same as artificial in use.
What is the Esperanto accusative?
The -n ending marks the object of a sentence, which lets word order move freely: mi vidas vin and vin mi vidas both mean I see you. It is the one rule learners genuinely get wrong, which is why this course drills it specifically rather than mentioning it once.
Is there a free Esperanto course online?
Yes, more than one. This course is free: 1,000 words in frequency order with audio in two accents, the full affix track, grammar articles and graded readers. lernu.net, the community's own portal, is also free and worth knowing as a doorway to forums and real speakers. Between the two you can reach conversational Esperanto without spending anything but the hours.