Why Do You Need to Learn Esperanto?

Guest post

Today I have a great pleasure to share with you a very interesting guest post from blogger Teddy Nee from www.neeslanguageblog.com. He advises strongly to learn Esperanto as an international, neutral, equal, relatively easy and living language.

You may be questioning “What is Esperanto?”, “Is it an international language?” or “Why do we need it when we already have English?” Esperanto may not be as popular as Spanish or French when we consider about learning a second language; however, it is much easier and simpler than both of them.

Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed language created by Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof (L.L. Zamenhof), a doctor and linguist from Bialystok (now part of Poland) in 1887. It was born as an idea of L.L. Zamenhof to break down barriers between people. Watch an excerpt of a documentary video about Esperanto HERE.

It is spoken by up to 2 million people around the world and numerous of native speakers who have learnt Esperanto from Esperanto-speaking parents. In addition, there are several Esperanto International events, such as Universala Kongreso (Universal Convention) and Internacia Junulara Kongreso (International Youth Convention) Find out more about the events HERE.

Major Characteristics

Lernu, a website about learning Esperanto, stated 5 major characteristics of Esperanto: International, Neutral, Equal, Relatively Easy, and Living.

• International. Esperanto is most useful for communicating among people of diverse nations who do not have a common mother tongue.

• Neutral. It doesn't belong to one people or country, so it works as a neutral language.

• Equal. When you use Esperanto, you feel more equal from a linguistic standpoint than when, for example, you speak Spanish with a native Spanish speaker.

• Relatively easy. Thanks to the structure of Esperanto, it is usually much easier to master than other foreign languages.

• Living. Esperanto evolves and lives just like other languages, and it can be used to express the most varied facets of human thought and emotion.

Learning Materials

You can find Esperanto learning materials easily on the Internet. One of the websites that provide free learning materials is Lernu. It offers courses of basic, intermediate, and advanced level, and detailed explanation about grammar, words and games. Apart from that, there are also chat box and forum where you can communicate with the other Esperanto learners or Esperantisto (Esperanto speaker) from around the world.

Esperanto as an International Language

Esperanto is widely recognized nowadays. It was reported in CNN [WATCH HERE] and BBC’s The One Show [WATCH HERE]. Google Translate added Esperanto as its 64^th language in 2012 and there are more than 180,000 Wikipedia articles in Esperanto.

Conclusion

Esperanto is so simple that everyone can learn it regardless the age. The simplicity really helps the learner to master the language quicker than any other language. There are abundant of books, websites, and songs in Esperanto available on the Internet. Therefore, learning Esperanto is a good idea if you want to learn a simple and practical foreign language.

Written by Teddy Nee - www.neeslanguageblog.com
I love to write. I am also a website developer, a language tutor, and a language enthusiast. My native languages are Fujianese/ Hokkien and Indonesian.
Apart from that, I also speak English and Chinese Mandarin as my first and second foreign language, respectively. I have been learning Spanish since 2012 and Esperanto since the end of May 2013.