There is undoubtedly a ton of socialist history regarding the promulgation and study of Esperanto.

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Esperanto

It does not seem like it is nearly as popular as it once was, but there are examples of it being used and even celebrated in Cuba, China, and the DPRK.

I adore the idea of a lingua universalis. I am also aware of many of the criticisms of Esperanto, from its ostensible Eurocentricity to its difficulty with escaping unnecessarily gendered language.

Is there much use in learning it, outside of personal interest or as a hobby? Do you think that there are Esperantist movements large enough to justify learning it? Enough speakers?

  • @lil_tank
    link
    English
    13
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    I’m not entirely sure of the scientific backing of that claim, but I heard that the current way of learning languages by studying them made it unnecessarily hard. On the contrary learning languages by immersing yourself like a child would could actually be the best way to learn languages.

    If that’s true then Esperanto would actually be a harder language to learn since you can’t really fully immerse yourself, there are no native speaking communities or anything.

    Also the reflection of ancient culture in languages is a beautiful thing to discover, an aspect that is absent from Esperanto

    Still, could be practical if a lot of people knew it, and would still be the easiest if language immersion turned out to be not as good as its defenders say

    • relay
      link
      English
      58 months ago

      in other words there is no reason to study any con lang?

      • 新星 [they/them/🏳️‍⚧️]
        link
        English
        118 months ago

        there is no reason to study any con lang?

        It can be interesting from a linguistic perspective, particularly ones that are different from natural languages, but if we’re talking 1000+ hour study or something, it probably would have been better use of time to learn Chinese or something