Esperanto for Adult Learners

Esperanto is the only language on this site that somebody sat down and designed. L. L. Zamenhof published it in Warsaw in 1887, having grown up in Białystok, a town where four communities lived uneasily alongside one another in four languages, and his stated aim was a neutral second language that nobody would have a home advantage in.

Whether that political project succeeded is a fair argument. What is not really arguable is that the linguistic engineering worked. Esperanto is genuinely, measurably faster to learn than any natural language, and the reasons are specific enough to state.

How long does it actually take?

The FSI never rated Esperanto, because the US Foreign Service has no diplomats to post to it. Every other estimate points the same way.

Roughly a tenth. That ratio is the whole pitch, and it is worth understanding why it holds rather than taking it on trust.

Where the time goes in a natural language

Think about what you actually spend hours on when learning French or Spanish.

Verb tables. Six forms per tense, a dozen or more tenses, several conjugation classes, and then an irregular list that includes the most common verbs in the language. Gender, which is arbitrary and must be learned per noun. Plural rules with exceptions. Agreement rules with exceptions to the exceptions. Spelling that has drifted from pronunciation over centuries.

Esperanto removes all of it:

• Verbs. Five endings - -as, -is, -os, -us, -u - and the ending never changes for person. Mi estas, vi estas, ili estas. There are no irregular verbs at all, including to be.
• Gender. None. La is the only article and it never changes.
• Plural. Add -j. Always.
• Spelling. One letter, one sound, no exceptions. You can pronounce any written word correctly on sight, and spell any spoken word correctly on hearing.

What is left is vocabulary, and vocabulary is the part any dictionary can help with.

The part that actually compounds

Here is the piece people underestimate. Esperanto marks part of speech with a final letter: -o noun, -a adjective, -e adverb, -i verb. Any root takes any ending.

So bon- gives you bona (good), bono (goodness), bone (well) and boni (to be good) for the price of one root. Then the affixes, which are fully productive, multiply it again: malbona (bad), bonega (excellent), plibonigi (to improve).

This is why a 200-root course is not a 200-word course. It behaves closer to 800, and you were not taught the extra 600.

It also means Esperanto vocabulary accelerates, which is the opposite of the usual experience. In French, your thousandth word is as much work as your hundredth. In Esperanto, by the time you hold two hundred roots and the affix system, new words are frequently things you can simply work out.

The strongest argument, which is not about Esperanto

If you are weighing whether this is worth your time, the propaedeutic effect deserves your attention.

Since the 1920s, a series of studies - in Britain, Germany, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere - have compared pupils taught a natural language for three years against pupils taught Esperanto for one year and then the natural language for two. The Esperanto-first groups have repeatedly ended up ahead in the natural language, despite two years of study rather than three.

The proposed mechanism is straightforward and plausible. Esperanto makes grammatical machinery visible. A learner meets the accusative, agreement, derivational morphology and the difference between an adjective and an adverb in a form so regular that the concept is unmissable. When they then meet the same concepts in French, buried under irregularity, they already have the category to file it under.

The studies are not all large or well controlled, and you should not treat this as settled. But the direction is consistent, and it makes Esperanto interesting even to someone who never intends to speak it.

The honest case against

This site is not going to pretend the objections are silly.

Nobody is waiting for you in an Esperanto-speaking country, because there isn't one. If your reason for learning a language is a place, a job or a family, learn that language.

The community is small, and it is not growing quickly. Somewhere between 60,000 and a few hundred thousand fluent speakers is a village compared to any natural language.

The neutrality claim is weaker than it looks. The vocabulary is overwhelmingly Romance with a Germanic and Slavic seasoning, so it is markedly easier for a European than for a speaker of Mandarin, Arabic or Yoruba. Esperanto is neutral between English and French. It is not neutral between English and Japanese.

The original project failed. Esperanto was not adopted as an international auxiliary language, and English took that role instead through economics rather than design.

What survives all four objections is this: it is fast, it is genuinely well made, the community that does exist is welcoming and organised, and there is reasonable evidence it makes your next language easier. That is enough.

What this course covers

Two hundred roots, which given the derivation system is a working vocabulary rather than a toy one. Along the way:

• the four word endings, and why they let you parse a sentence before you can translate it;
• the five verb endings, and the fact that there are no irregular verbs to follow up with;
• the accusative -n, the one thing here you have no English instinct for;
• the correlative table, 45 words built from fourteen pieces;
• the affix system, which is what turns 200 roots into something much larger.

If you finish it, you will be able to read simple Esperanto prose without a dictionary, and you will have met every structural feature the language has. There is no second layer of exceptions waiting.

That claim would be dishonest about any other language on this site. Here it is just true.

Read more about Esperanto

The wider picture, before or alongside the course:

• Is it for you? Why learn Esperanto, is it really that easy, how long it actually takes, and how to go about learning it.
• Who speaks it, and where. How many people speak Esperanto and where in the world it is spoken.
• Handy reference. The Esperanto dictionary, the numbers, example sentences to read, and basic phrases to start with.
• Against the neighbours. Esperanto vs Ido, Esperanto vs Interlingua, and Toki Pona vs Esperanto.