Why learn Esperanto?

What is the point of learning Esperanto?

There are plenty of reasons to learn Esperanto. Here, we’ve listed a few of them:

Travel

Do you enjoy travelling to far away places but don’t have time to learn each of the languages before you go? And you have probably noticed that English isn’t always that helpful. If you’re keen to communicate wih the locals and get to know a country better, then learn Esperanto!

Esperanto speakers can be found in more than 100 countries. With the help of the internet and some basic Esperanto knowledge, it’s easy to get in touch with the local Esperanto association before you travel. Esperantists are often happy to play host and show guests around town. They might even welcome you into their homes to stay a night or two.

You’ll find a list of worldwide Esperanto events at Where to Speak?

Save Time and Money

Those who offer content online for an international audience (like we do at Lingolía), can’t avoid having to translate their work into as many languages as possible. Translating costs time and money which then eats into the creation of new content. If we could use Esperanto as a bridging language, then surely the translation work load would be substantially reduced.

Easy to Learn

You can get by in many places with a little Spanish or French. But once you move beyond the basics, you might find yourself getting stuck. The thing that makes Esperanto so great is its simplicity. The skills you acquire in a matter of days or weeks in Esperanto would take months or years to master in other languages.

Here are some advantages of Esperanto:

  • The pronunciation is simple because there is only one way to pronounce each letter and the word stress always falls on the second last syllable.
  • We can derive words from other words with the help of particular syllables. In this way, we instantly know the different names for animals: male animal (vir-), female animal (-in-), baby animal (-id-) and unfavourable animal (-aĉ-), without having to learn a different word each time. Let’s take a dog (hundo), for example: male dog (virhundo), bitch (hundino), puppy (hundido), mongrel (hundaĉo).
  • The numbers up to one million are quicker to learn in Esperanto than the numbers up to 100 in any other language. We only need to learn 13 numbers (1-10, hundred, thousand and million) which we then simply combine to form the rest of the numbers.
  • The grammar is so simple that you almost pick it up as you go. Take the tenses for example, no conjugations and no irregular verbs! Sentences you can express in the present tense are easily transformed into the past and future tenses – we only change one letter each time.

Take the plunge and spend some time exploring our website. You’ll find grammar explanations and exercises as well as themed vocabulary pages. Happy browsing!