How to actually learn Esperanto

The ladder that works

Six rungs, in order, and the order matters more than any single choice on it.

1. Pronunciation, in an afternoon

Twenty-eight letters, one sound each, stress on the second-last syllable. Finish it first, in one sitting with the pronunciation page, and every later hour of listening pays better. Then solve typing the hatted six, or you will spend a year writing cx and sx.

• ĉokolado - chocolate: ĉo-ko-LA-do, stress on the second-last.

2. Vocabulary in frequency order, not by theme

This course teaches roots in frequency order, because the top thousand roots do most of the work in any text, while a themed list spends week two on giraffe and saucepan. And learn roots, not words: a root plus the endings is four words, plus the affixes a dozen.

3. The affix system early, not late

A learner with two hundred roots and the affixes can say more than one with four hundred roots and no idea how to build:

• malgranda - small (mal- + big)
• lernejo - school (learn + place)

Claude Piron's La bona lingvo (1989) argues that good Esperanto is built from the basic roots and their affixes rather than imported words: the beginner's toolkit is also the expert's.

4. Graded reading at a hard ceiling

A text inside the vocabulary you hold is practice; one outside it is homework, and you will stop doing it. This site's stories each carry a frequency ceiling checked by a script. Outside it, the standard first novel is Claude Piron's Gerda malaperis! (1983), with Lasu min paroli plu! (1984) after it; the bookshelf has the ladder in order.

5. Spaced repetition, to stop the leak

A word met once and never again is lost. Spaced repetition reviews it just before you would forget, and the interval grows each time you get it right. The site's drill does this over the lemmas the course teaches.

• Li scias la regulojn parkere. - He knows the rules by heart.

Knowing a word parkere is the floor, not the ceiling: you can produce the gloss, which is not the same as using it. Rungs four and six are for everything above it.

6. Speaking, months before you feel ready

Production is a separate skill from recognition, and no amount of the second produces the first. The community is small, spread out and welcoming to a beginner who turns up and talks:

Pasporta Servo started with 39 hosts in its first directory, and the condition of the free bed is that you speak Esperanto in it. Older guides send you to the Slovak Somera Esperanto-Studado, which has not run in person since 2019. The congress article covers a week at the big one.

There is a word for what not to do: krokodili, to crocodile, is to speak your own national language at an Esperanto event. Spoken Esperanto has the whole reptile family.