Parallel Learning

I'm mainly doing the FEC, the correspondence course; here I get the basics, and also am in touch with an actual human being, so I can try out writing a few sentences and get feedback on those. A bit more of a personal touch than a simple self-study course. And I did try a few self-study courses in my time, not just with Esperanto. Getting through them is hard.

So while I'm waiting for the corrections of my exercises (which are turned around extremely fast!), and in idle time during the day (eg my lunch break) I'm having a look at what other learning resources there are, and there are a few Esperanto-related ones. Today I was curious if there was an Esperanto group on Facebook, and there are in fact several. In one of their postings I found a reference to Unilang, which has an Esperanto course for beginners. This is quite good, but has a few typos, and there are some answers which seem not quite right in English.

The best thing is that it's fun to practice different sentences, learn a different set of words, and repeat the basic grammar described from different angles. And, unlike the FEC, it's not as out-dated: I haven't yet come across sentences where a teacher beats a pupil, a bad girl smokes (only men smoke, good girls don't) and mother washes the children. And who drives to Paris with lemonade under their seats?!?

Progress: just finished lesson 7 today, which is a test. I wanted to do it without reference to the teaching materials, and it was quite easy. Translating vocabulary from Esperanto into English is not much of a problem if you've had some exposure to European languages--the other way round is much more tricky!