Esperanto on YouTube

I had a look at 'Esperanto' on YouTube, and there are indeed some video clips of people talking in Esperanto. Some are obviously staged, and sound unnatural, but there are others as well, and it really brings home the difference between learning a language from text and learning it from conversations.

In order to learn it properly, I guess I have to investigate that in the future.

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Mi rigardi 'Esperanto' en 'YouTube', kaj mi trovis kelkajn filmojn de personoj konversacias en e-o. Kelkaj estas sursceniga kaj sonas malkrude, sed tie estas aliaj. Ili klarigas la distingo de lerni lingvon skribe kaj parole.

Lerni e-o dece, mi devas esplori tian estonte.

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!

Starting off

Learning by yourself, especially a language, is quite hard. To begin with, you need to find the motivation/energy/time. Earlier this (academic) year I tried to teach myself Latin, or rather, refresh my school Latin from decades ago. I did manage to get some way into it, but it is not very satisfying when doing exercises that you need to self-correct. Often I had the impression I had come up with a valid paraphrase (but I wasn't sure), and I could also not tell what that sentence I erroneously wrote actually meant (if it meant anything at all!). But as soon as you involve a teacher you are restricted with time (as you need yet another regular slot in your busy schedule) and it also costs money (which you might not want to spend if it's just a for-fun-activity).

With Esperanto there is a correspondence course which works by email. You do exercises, send them by email to a tutor that has been assigned to you, and you get it back with comments. Brilliant. You also have a contact person now, and in my emails accompanying the exercises I can try out writing stuff in Esperanto. Pretty broken Esperanto, but at least it gives you a chance to practice.

In order to sign up, go to the site pacujo.net and follow the link. The pages look a bit old-fashioned, and I first wondered it it was still working, but shortly afterwards a got an email from a nice man living in Canada who told me I had not made any mistakes with my translations. How encouraging! I'm now looking forward to working my way through the ten lessons, and hopefully by the end I will be some way towards my goal. I'll keep you posted...