Conlangs, or Constructed Languages

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Is Esperanto worth learning in the modern day? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by SovereignState@lemmygrad.ml to c/conlang@lemmygrad.ml

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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?

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[–] Alfika07@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

There are in fact large Esperanto communities, but they are very segregated from conlanging communities, because Esperanto is one of the most hated conlangs. Esperanto was very overhyped when it first came out. Because it has many haters and it's overall a pretty mid conlang , I wouldn't recommend learning it. If you want to be understood in many places, you should rather learn a popular natural language like Mandarin. If you want to be in the conlang community, then learn toki pona.

[–] gmestanley@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

If you want a serious answer, no, I don't think it's worth it.

Learning Esperanto means you learn one of the very first attempts to make a universal language from scratch (first doesn't mean good), a very eurocentric language as its critics have put it, and you basically sell your soul to the Akademio, the entity regulating Esperanto. I don't see anything to gain from that.

The fact that communist countries have a history with it and celebrate it seems to be for different reasons. For example, the USSR once tried to use Esperanto because for them it was better than using English, which was the language the USA were pushing forward, a country that used capitalism as its model. Not to mention that at the time, there wasn't wider knowledge of which languages were better than Esperanto, the popular "universal language"; it's no wonder things happened this way.

[–] lil_tank@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] Shinhoshi@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 year 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