Nice short video about things one could do after (and during) learning Esperanto (via Amuzulo). No surprise to anyone - except Esperanto-bashers - that one can do pretty much anything - travel, read books, make friends, play games, participate in congresses with thousands of people, etc). Any new language is a cross-cutting experience, Esperanto is not an exception.

The video finishes with a pointer to www.lernu.net , an Esperanto learning website that I strongly recommend myself. I am currently using it as my primary learning method.
In fact, Lernu! is a better website from language-learning point of view than I have seen for other languages (e.g., French). Part of that is because many of the Esperanto resources are free (dictionaries, reading materials, etc), while resources for other languages are commercialised to the point that one site cannot even afford to integrate them together. And I am not even talking about distributed volunteer mentors that are happy to help in whatever is your first language.

I am an idealist inside. But I keep that well hidden. So, when I look at something that needs to be done, I search for the low hanging fruit. Grand ambitions are fine, but if they are not backed up by the near term useful solutions, everything will stagnate and die.

With Esperanto, the core idea is so great and compelling that many people seem to have difficulties to turn their eyes to identifying more immediate opportunities. This seem to be slowly changing in the last several years with absolutely amazing projects such as lernu.net and RadioArkivo.

Still, it was great to find a free online book(Esperanto: A Language for the Global Village by Sylvan Zaft) that adds in a lot of rational reasoning into the heady original concepts. The Cost-Benefit chapter is particularly interesting, but others are just as good.

I guess on the scale of Esperantists, I would be more close (but not fully aligned) with the Raumists.

Tags: esperanto Language learning

Every couple of years World Esperanto Association (UEA) makes a statement at United Nations to pay more attention to linguistic inequality and (at least a couple of years ago) to consider teaching Esperanto as per UNESCO’s recommendation in 1985. Usually nothing happens out of it. UEA is an NGO registered with United Nations, but there are many NGOs and many things they ask for.

Now, I have just discovered that there is an internet petition to United Nations to recognize Esperanto as the international language. Already, more than 4500 people signed.

It would be interesting to see how far it will get and what will come out of it, even if just as an indication of how many people are actively looking out for Esperanto issues.

I have voted, because I think that in some cases Esperanto is a much better option to teach than English. Or at least as an option before English/French/etc.

For example, if a piecekeeping missing is established in an area where natives don’t speak English/French/Spanish/etc. and the local language is difficult as well, teaching Esperanto for communication purposes would be much faster and more effective than trying to teach English or even fight for the limited number of interpreters available. At the moment, I believe these situations are treated as effectively unresolvable and the high costs and slow process caused are taken as granted. Esperanto might be just the right outside-the-square solution for this.

Tags: esperanto, languages