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The Invented Language That Found a Second Life Online (bbc.com)
More than 100 years after it was invented, Esperanto is spoken by relatively few people. But the internet has brought new life to this intriguing, invented language. From a report: Since it [Esperanto] was first proposed in a small booklet written by Ludwik L Zamenhof in 1887, it has evolved into the quintessential invented language, the liveliest and most popular ever created. But, many would tell you, Esperanto is a failure. More than a century after it was created, its current speaker base is just some two million people -- a geeky niche, not unlike the fan base of any other obscure hobby.
[...] Learning Esperanto used to be a solitary quest. You could practise it by sitting for weeks with a book and a dictionary, figuring out the rules and memorising the words. But there was usually no professor to correct your mistakes or polish your pronunciation. That's how Anna Lowenstein taught herself Esperanto in her teenage years, after becoming frustrated with the oddities of the French she was learning in school. In the last page of her textbook, there was an address for the British Esperanto Association. She sent a letter, and some time later was invited to a meeting of young speakers in St Albans.
The global community that Lowenstein was joining was put together via snail mail, paper magazines and yearly meetings. [...] Newer generations are not as patient, and they don't have to be. Unlike most of their elders, who rarely had the chance to speak Esperanto, today's speakers can use the language every day online. Even old computer communication services like Usenet had Esperanto-speaking hubs, and a lot of pages and chat rooms sprouted in the early days of the Web. Today, the younger segment of the Esperantio is keen on using social media: they gather around several groups in Facebook and Telegram, a chat service.
[...] Learning Esperanto used to be a solitary quest. You could practise it by sitting for weeks with a book and a dictionary, figuring out the rules and memorising the words. But there was usually no professor to correct your mistakes or polish your pronunciation. That's how Anna Lowenstein taught herself Esperanto in her teenage years, after becoming frustrated with the oddities of the French she was learning in school. In the last page of her textbook, there was an address for the British Esperanto Association. She sent a letter, and some time later was invited to a meeting of young speakers in St Albans.
The global community that Lowenstein was joining was put together via snail mail, paper magazines and yearly meetings. [...] Newer generations are not as patient, and they don't have to be. Unlike most of their elders, who rarely had the chance to speak Esperanto, today's speakers can use the language every day online. Even old computer communication services like Usenet had Esperanto-speaking hubs, and a lot of pages and chat rooms sprouted in the early days of the Web. Today, the younger segment of the Esperantio is keen on using social media: they gather around several groups in Facebook and Telegram, a chat service.
Romanes eunt domus.
DaveyJJ
My guess would be that this has more to do with the clusterfuck the Hungarian language is than anything else...
It's not just the Hungarians. I know in a small number of French schools they do the same thing, some places in China do this too. They teach Esperanto first and then a secondary language next. They learn both languages quicker than if the learnt the second language alone.
Esperanto is deliberately designed to be easy for anyone to learn. It's not a complicated mess like most natural languages; you can learn Esperanto in a fraction of the time it takes to learn most other languages. I think for many people (without foreign language skills already) it acts as a way to train your brain to be receptive to learning new languages. Once your brain has adapted to learn other languages, it makes learning additional ones easier.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Esperanto was invented by an opthamologist, L. L. Zamenhof, to be a universal second (and maybe eventually first) language that would overcome the "curse of Babel", so many different tongues in use that people cannot communicate. Being an artificial language there would be one codified grammar that everyone would use instead of the many dialectical variations seen in natural languages.
Only Zamenhof, while multi-lingual, was no linguist and did a mediocre job of designing the language. In his (partial) defense he was one of the first to try this (there were a few earlier projects), artificial language design was not trendy the way it seems today.
And so for a universal, common language Esperanto has had a tendency to generate new dialects (Ido, Romániço, etc.) often due the inadequacies of Zamenhof's original specification.
There are a number of significant design flaws that make this "easy to learn" language unnecessarily hard. The transitivity of verbs for example requires memorizing the semi-arbitrary rule assignments for hundreds of verbs, and most Esperanto users make frequent errors. Also the actual interpretation of verbs was not properly defined by Zamenhof, whether they express tenses (past, present, future) or aspects (whether it is completed or on-going). Zamenhof apparently did not understand the distinction himself and wrote contradictory things. In fact his grammar is often vague and numerous controversies have developed over the years.
Then there was the wholly unnecessary inclusion of gender for nouns. Zamenhof apparently did this because the languages he was familiar with did this, but the gender assignments are arbitrary, add nothing of a value to the language, require memorization, and are a problem that must be decided with each newly coined word. As a result the language in use has diverged from the official grammar and dictionary, with the conversion of most "male" gendered words to neutral. And this has led to a dialectical split in the language with people who want to simply eliminate gender (or at least the male gender) and those that want to preserve the original specification (such as it is).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Learning a third language is impossible if you don't know a second language.