Esperanto

Learning Esperanto

How to learn Esperanto?

The traditional method for learning a language is to sit down in a class, with a teacher. Unfortunately, Esperanto classes are few and far between; even in an area where there may be more than one going on at the same time (e.g. the Bay Area of California), there may be quite a bit of travel involved, as well as some restrictions (the regular class at U.C. Berkeley, though theoretically open to the public, is generally reserved primarily for students at the university, for instance).

Luckily, unlike most other languages, Esperanto doesn't really require either a teacher or a class; you can learn this language on your own. Unfortunately, again, finding a textbook -- at least in your friendly neighborhood bookstore -- is not always easy. Of the four that I can think of offhand, none is currently available in the United States through regular distribution networks: Step By Step in Esperanto (Butler), published by the Esperanto League for North America, is available from ELNA or by special order from your bookstore; Beginner's Esperanto (Conroy), which was not a very good self-teacher anyway, has gone out of print; Teach Yourself Esperanto (Cresswell & Hartley), probably and deservedly the most popular English-language Esperanto textbook, is no longer available in this country except through ELNA (it has to be ordered from England); and Esperanto - Learning and Using the International Language (Richardson) is currently out of print, though a new edition is at the printer's, and should be available (from ELNA) shortly, and shortly after that through special order from your bookstore.

But -- let me state a heresy here -- Esperanto textbooks, perhaps unlike those of other languages, contain an unconscionable amount of padding. My own feeling is that you don't need a textbook to learn the language, just a quick schema of how the language works, a dictionary of sorts, and some reading material to get you started. You can find the schema and plenty of reading material on-line. You can find dictionaries, too, but I'd really recommend getting something in paper, and I'll give you a couple of recommendations below.

In the meantime, start by visiting the following three pages, reading them thoroughly, and perhaps printing them out:

http://www.webcom.com/donh/Esperanto/rules.html

This is a list of the so-called "16 rules of Esperanto grammar". Once you understand these, and how they are used, you will have 90% of what you need to know about Esperanto's morphology. Much of the other 10% can be found at

http://www.webcom.com/donh/Esperanto/correlatives.html

These are the "who, what, when, where, how, why, etc." of Esperanto, the only significant subsystem of the language not touched on by the 16 rules. With these two pages, you should have no trouble following the structure of written Esperanto, if not its content. For a bit more information on content, go to

http://www.webcom.com/donh/Esperanto/affixes.html

which will show you how to build words in Esperanto, using the three dozen or so prefixes and suffixes that the language makes great use of.

Beyond this, you can start immediately by accessing various on-line dictionaries of Esperanto (but you have to be very careful about these; far too often they're just word lookup lists which operate under the assumption that there's a one-to-one mapping between Esperanto words and English words -- which is simply not true). I'd recommend, for starters, the following two works to keep beside you on your desktop.

The Esperanto Association of Britain recently published a mini-dictionary for five dollars. You can get this from ELNA. It contains more than two thousand words and their equivalents, and should be far more than you need for basic conversational or writing ability.

You should also have a dictionary that shows words in Esperanto and their meanings, also in Esperanto, so that you don't get confused by English "equivalents". The standard is the Nova Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto (New Complete Illustrated Dictionary of Esperanto), which unfortunately costs more than a hundred dollars and contains lots and lots of words which, if you're lucky, you'll never have any need for. Many people make do with the old Plena Vortaro de Esperanto (Complete Dictionary of Esperanto), which is half a century out of date (but that's not too much; the only thing you might really miss are the computer terms) and costs around $30-40. But I would recommend Wouter Pilger's Baza Esperanta Radikaro, which costs about ten dollars and contains several thousand basic roots and their definitions in really basic Esperanto.

Another possible approach to the language is to get hold of a "key", which is a tiny little booklet containing Esperanto grammar and a minimal Esperanto-English vocabulary. Keys were originally devised around the start of the 20th century for correspondence; somebody who wanted to write a letter (say, a business letter) to somebody in another country would write the letter in Esperanto, toss the key into the envelope along with the letter (the keys are so tiny that they added little to the cost of postage), and send the letter; presumably the person at the other end would use the key to decipher the letter. There are cases, attested to, in which the recipient replied in Esperanto, apparently having learned at least the basics of the language from the enclosed key. The Universala Esperanto-Asocio now appears to be looking at the possibility of using such "keys" for introducing Esperanto into areas where it is relatively unknown (their first new key, one for Turkish, appeared on the internet the other day, and should be out in a paper edition shortly). If you're interested in this possibility, check with ELNA; you can get an English-language key from them for less than a dollar, and they have a matching English-Esperanto vocabulary pamphlet for about the same price. Warning: to read this thing properly, you'll probably want to have a reader's magnifying glass, unless you have really good eyes.

Posted by Don Harlow at January 20, 2004 02:02 PM | TrackBack