The idea of Esperanto immediately appealed to me. One thing was the logic of it: a language designed to be a second language for everyone — the “bridge” language idea: that people can universally communicate by learning just one language in addition to their own. And then the codicil: that such a common second language should be easy to learn (no gendered nouns, no irregular verbs, easy acquisition of vocabulary with the help of a kit of snap-together affixes. “If you want a horse to jump a fence, make the fence as low as possible” — that is, eliminate all possible impediments to the action you want to encourage.

The “universal second language” may be displaced by AI real-time interpreters, but Esperanto remains interesting (to me) as a language, and now with the internet, Esperanto has more support — for example, I am now taking a B1 course (via Teams, Microsoft’s version of Zoom) from Jagiellonian University: 7 months, one 1.5-hour class per week. Previously, I took three A2 (more or less) courses from Kusaro.net: 3 months, one 1-hour class per week. And I practice speaking via Ekparolu! (free 30-minute one-to-one sessions with advanced speakers who have some training in helping novices).

My reason for learning Esperanto is not the universal-language thing, which clearly has not happened, however much sense it makes. Instead, I have two other reasons.

First, I’ve always wondered what it’s like to be fluent in another language. I wanted to experience that and also observe what happens (in me) as I gain the ability. Since fluency is the goal, it made sense to me to pick the language in which fluency is most easily achieved — thus, Esperanto.

I read that becoming fluent in Esperanto takes about a year, and at 7 months in, that seems about right. I am just completing three Zoom classes via London Esperanto (conducted entirely in Esperanto), and I just started a 7-month course from Jagiellonian University in Krakow: one 1.5-hour class per week, at B1 level.

This is not my first effort, but this one is being successful. What undermined my earlier tries was an unrealistic expectation: that I could achieve some level of fluency in 3-4 months. When I was not fluent after 4 months, I felt I had failed and fell away. But this time, I came across a comment that it takes around a year of steady study and practice to achieve fluency, and that greatly increased my patience. Now, 7 months in, I have been taking classes conducted solely in Esperanto, keep my daily journal in Esperanto, listen to a variety of Esperanto podcasts, and correspond in Esperanto (with some correspondents who do not know English). I have a blog post where I’ve been collecting my discoveries and listing the resources I’ve found.

My second reason for learning Esperanto actually relies on the fact that it is not a universal language. It seems to me that Esperanto acts as a filter: the people nowadays interested in learning Esperanto are generally those who want to meet people from other cultures, value person-to-person cross-cultural relationships, and tend to be friendly and curious. In a sense, Esperanto becomes the focus of a hobbyist group with a shared interest, and that interest is communicating with people from other cultures — and of course Esperanto greatly helps in that communication.

There are other reasons to learn Esperanto, of course, and an important one has already been mentioned: learning Esperanto as a first foreign language makes it easier to learn other foreign languages. One experiment in Finland, in a school where three years of German was standard, had an experimental group spend one year learning Esperanto, followed by two years learning German (while they continued to use Esperanto in some other course, just as the language of instruction). At the end of three years, the Esperanto group spoke German more fluently and confidently than the group who had studied only German for three years.