Hi! My name is Isaac Basque-Rice, I'm A Security Engineer and former Abertay Ethical Hacker, and this website is a repository for all the cool stuff I've done, enjoy!
This article is also available in Esperanto
Esperanto is a constructed language (Conlang) developed by L.L. Zamenhof, a Polish Jewish Ophthalmologist, in the late 1800s. Zamenhof’s idea was to create a language that would be a universal second language for communication across language barriers. Zamenhof lived in a city (Bialystok) with multiple people groups who all spoke different languages, and observed that the lack of ability to communicate between groups results in dehumanisation, which can end in violence and discrimination.
Esperanto itself takes concepts and ideas from various European languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Polish, and English. Which results in (at least for European people) a much easier language learning product. Some say it takes less than 150 hours to become competent in Esperanto, which contrasts with the 1500 hours it takes for English, and the 2000 hours it takes for German (depending on one’s native language, of course)
Unfortunately, Zamenhof’s ideals wouldn’t come to fruition, there are only between 100,000 and 2 million Esperanto speakers worldwide and nowhere on earth currently has it as a national, plural, or recognised language.
However what it doesn’t have with regards to recognition it definitely has with regards to helping people learn other languages. Studies suggest that a child who spends 2 years learning Esperanto and 3 years learning any other European language ends up more competent in the target language than a child who spends 5 years just learning that one language.
I’m using a number of tools, firstly, Lernu.net, a fantastic online resource for Esperanto. I’m also using Duolingo, which has some well-known benefits for language acquisition, as well as Anki, a free and open source flashcard program, to sure up my vocabulary.
For speaking and listening practise I’m using Common Voice Esperanto, which is a tool sponsored by Mozilla with the aim of teaching common speech to train an AI, the byproduct of which is it’s great for listening to people speak and practising your own speech. Finally, of course, I’m using Google Translate when i need help with specific words or sentence structure.