How to Teach Yourself Esperanto

Learning a language can be a challenging but very rewarding experience. It can be difficult, however, to find the time and motivation to learn and practice a language, especially if you are attempting to teach yourself. Esperanto is a good language to learn, easy to teach yourself in a short amount of time with very little frustration.

Esperanto was created by L.L. Zamenhof in the 1880s. It was intended to be a universal language, and, as such, was constructed in a way that made it easy to learn, with a vocabulary drawing heavily from the Romance languages, completely regular verb forms, and a number of prefixes and suffixes used to modify root words. Although the idea of Esperanto as a universal language never really caught on, there are 100,000 to 2 million speakers worldwide, including one thousand native speakers.

Esperanto may not be practical for communication, except on internet forums and Esperanto conventions, but it can be picked up very quickly and will help sharpen your language-learning skills.

There are many websites offering resources to learn Esperanto. One particularly good page, Free Esperanto Course, not only offers lessons and exercises but matches students to Esperanto speakers for one-on-one tutoring. If English is not your first language, don't worry; the site also offers links to similar courses for speakers of Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Indonesian.

Another site, Kurso de Esperanto, offers a free downloadable program in twenty-six different languages, including Polish, Japanese, and Greek. Each of the lessons features an audio pronunciation guide, a very important resource for a self-taught speaker. In addition, Lernu.net offers several online Esperanto courses, including one for children.

In addition to computer-based courses, two public domain books are available on Project Gutenberg: A Complete Grammar of Esperanto, by Ivy Kellerman Reed, and The Esperanto Teacher, by Helen Fryer.

As a self-taught student of Esperanto you should make use of three or more different resources, as no one lesson plan or guide will be completely suited for your learning style. It may also be helpful to do some work of your own off the computer, such as writing flash cards, or practicing the language by buying one of your favorite books in an Esperanto translation.

To make a language stick, it is necessary to use it for communication. If you have studied hard, it will only be a few months or even weeks before you are comfortable conversing in Esperanto. Since Esperanto is both easy to learn and spoken by people throughout the world, you will be able to speak to people in different countries and cultures with whom you would not normally connect.

Teaching yourself Esperanto is a rewarding experience which will hopefully stick with you for many years. Bonŝancon! (Good luck!)