Esperanto

[Bogdan]

Esperanto is an artificial language created by L.L. Zamenhof who wanted to create a language that is easy to learn to serve as an international language for conversation between people who didn't share the same language, bussiness and so on. He wanted a language that wasn't "owned" by a certain nation and one that was quite easy for everyone to speak as it's a combination of languages.

Right now there are several sites teaching Esperanto and was wondering if there are any other speakers or enthuziasts on runouw. I started some time ago learning from a site, but I'm just super lazy to practice everyday, but doesn't mean it's easy.

Are there any other adepts?

Edit: If you are looking to start lernu! is a pretty good and nice site to start learning. It has some interesting courses and some of them even include pictures.

[GrandPiano]

I've heard of it, and it sounds interesting. I might get into it some day. For now, Mandarin is enough for me.

[Oranjui]

I've been interested in it for a while now but I never felt compelled to actually learn the language. I think right now it would probably be a bad idea for me to try to start since I'm already taking German, so I don't particularly want to deal with 3 languages at once (among other things). I looked into it and other constructed languages like Ido and Lojban and this one looks much more promising than the others I've seen. Wikipedia says there are 2 million Esperanto speakers, so that's not a ton, but it's enough to convince me that it could be a practical thing to learn. Dunno, one day I might decide on a whim to start learning it. I don't speak any Romance languages though, so it's not going to be very easy for me.

[GrandPiano]

Whelp, I'm suddenly extremely interested.

EDIT: Question: I see that the Esperanto "j" is pronounced like the English "y"; I also see (or at least it seems) that plural words are formed by putting a j at the end. How do I pronounce, per say, "bildoj" or "demandoj"? Is the oj like "oy", or is it a distinct "oh-ee", or what?

[Bogdan]

I've been interested in it for a while now but I never felt compelled to actually learn the language. I think right now it would probably be a bad idea for me to try to start since I'm already taking German, so I don't particularly want to deal with 3 languages at once (among other things). I looked into it and other constructed languages like Ido and Lojban and this one looks much more promising than the others I've seen. Wikipedia says there are 2 million Esperanto speakers, so that's not a ton, but it's enough to convince me that it could be a practical thing to learn. Dunno, one day I might decide on a whim to start learning it. I don't speak any Romance languages though, so it's not going to be very easy for me.

FIRST Esperanto is not entirely a romance language. It's mixed which means it contains several parts from languages like germanic, slavic and romance languages. If you do learn german then I'm sure you know that an 'in" suffix in nouns change it from male to female in most cases, such as:
Lehrer (teacher, male) -> Lehrerin(teacher, female)
This thing also happens in Esperanto:
Viro (man, boy) -> Virino (woman, girl)
(Note: In esperanto, all nouns end with O so they are easy to recognize)

I learn german too, mostly because forced by school and I honestly hate it (no offence german lovers/speakers), but it's just too complicated. My language, romanian, has probably one of the hardest grammar of the existing languages (there were several swiss and british visitors who tried to learn and complained), but being native it's way easier for me to understand. Now in german, everything I previously knew from my language is pretty useless. The sentence structure, adjectives, cases and so on are just...they seem a bit illogical if I was to adapt it. There are colleagues who do have interest in this, but tbh I wouldn't abandon it if I have the occassion and would learn either Spanish/Italian/Portuguese or some slavic language such as Russian or Ukrainian as the ones I named are way more appropiate to me (and probably would be as useful as I don't speak german with anybody and don't plan doing so).
Esperanto shouldn't be a problem, even if it would be a 3rd language it would be easy.

Whelp, I'm suddenly extremely interested.

EDIT: Question: I see that the Esperanto "j" is pronounced like the English "y"; I also see (or at least it seems) that plural words are formed by putting a j at the end. How do I pronounce, per say, "bildoj" or "demandoj"? Is the oj like "oy", or is it a distinct "oh-ee", or what?

If you at least heard german once or twice in your life, then you know that J pronounced like Y/I, such as in "Ja" or "Jägermeister". That thing in esperanto was borowed from german. If you did go to lernu.net, they have the pronounciation next to the sentence:

Example Ili fotas. Ili estas fotistoj. (En: They take pictures. They are photographers)
As I'm not native english speaker and I don't know entirely how do you pronounce certain things, this may be innacurate, but I think you can pronounce the nouns you listed as:
Bill-doh-ee (J is plural) -> Bill-doh (singular)
Deh-man-doh-ee (man as in german mann, with the sound ah, not eh in the middle as in men)

[GrandPiano]

I did know that the j pronunciation was borrowed from German; I just didn't know how it should be pronounced at the end of a word. Listening to the audio file you linked to, it sounds like an "oy" sound.

I'm confused about the pronunciation you gave for "bildo", though; if the letter "i" makes an "ee" sound, wouldn't it be pronounced "beel-doh", not "bill-doh"? I dunno if Romanian has a short "i" sound, so maybe you pronounce them the same, but native English speakers pronounce "bill" with a different vowel sound than "peel".

I did go to lernu.net (that's where I saw words like "bildo" and "demando"), but I didn't go much into it, and I didn't register yet, so I haven't seen any sentence audio files yet.

[Oranjui]

With the -oj sound, I'm hearing somewhere between those two. I would probably go with the "oh-ee" sound but maybe say it quickly or blend it somewhat. I guess that's what the "oy"/"oi" sound kind of is anyway but I hear a bit of distinction sometimes in the pronunciation. edit: ninja'd. After a little googling, Romanian doesn't appear to have the same short I sound as in English (but don't take it from me. Should probably let the person who actually speaks the language answer that, lol). Regardless of whether it is or not, in Esperanto it looks like the letter "i" should always make an "ee" sound to native English speakers. Maybe we should just use IPA?

Now that I'm doing the introductory lesson, it looks much simpler than I had thought. I love the whole "no ambiguity" theme in all of these constructed languages. Concrete pronunciation, regular grammar, things like that. This is the first I've seen this whole prefix/suffix thing (noun = -o, plural noun = -oj, negation = mal-, etc) which is interesting. Kind of reminds me of newspeak (doubleplusungood), but what artificial language doesn't. The words are much easier to decipher here than in things like Lojban, since this has all of the roots from Latin and Greek and modern languages too. I just might want to continue this.

[Bogdan]

Maybe, the english way of pronouncing letters are pretty weird to me, but again that may be because I'm not native. If you find helpful, wikipedia shows the pronounciations of romanian letters. Just in case someone asks again for pronounciation and I don't do it accuratly next time.

[Megar]

all i thought of looking at the title was this
but i guess i could try learning this although it wouldn't be useful for me ever

[Oranjui]

So I did a few more lessons and there was an -uj ending which is pronounced as "ooh-ee," so I guess consecutive vowels are supposed to be distinct. It's still sort of meshed together so it sounds like one word and not two.

This is a hell of a lot easier than any other language I've tried to learn by the way. Familiar roots, unambiguous, versatile. Maybe not practical in the short term (~0.02805% chance to pick any random person in the world who speaks it as of now) but it's nice to know languages.