Learning Esperanto in Six Weeks - day zero

By Kent Roper on 29 April 2014

I love learning languages. And for years I've thought I should document my language learning online in a blog.

Finally I'm doing that.

A couple of days ago I was going through my e-mail inbox. I'm subscribed to Benny the Irish Polyglot's newsletter. His most recent e-mail listed a link to a 6 week challenge to learn Esperanto.

Intrigued, I decided to sign up. The challenge runs from May 1st to June 11th. The hardest part so far is to not start learning Esperanto early.

Esperanto, for those who don't know, is a language invented in the 1800's. It was meant to be an international language, and it was meant to be easy to learn.

I'm a native English speaker, studied French in high school, learned Italian while living in Italy for almost two years, picked up quite a bit of Spanish from living in California, and I'm studying German right now on Duolingo.

So, I'm hoping with this background Esperanto will be easy.

While waiting for the May 1st start date to arrive, I've found a few resources to hopefully help me out.

Through my pod-cast listening app on my phone I've found "Esperanto Self-taught with Phonetic Pronunciation" by William W. Mann. It appears to be a four-year old audio recording of a hundred-year old Esperanto text book. I can listen to this on my drive to and from work. I also take walks during my breaks at work, and can listen while I'm walking.

I also found the website lernu, a website with free Esperanto lessons, and a site with some Esperanto flash cards.

I'm sure I'll find more resources as I go along, and I'll let you know which ones worked for me and which ones I wasn't too impressed with.