Does anyone here actually speak/write in Esperanto? I don't believe I've met anyone in real life who engages in Esperanto or even knows terribly alot about this "artificial" language.

From what I've gathered, learning Esperanto wouldn't be of much practical use unless you are doing something in, let's say, international affairs. Also, I've heard it relatively more popular, to a small extent, in Eurasian countries, especially in the EU, than America.

It's only popular among certain nerds.

English

To be more precise, it's only popular among certain people with specific mental illnesses.

Esperanto has been largely discredited by linguists. The purpose was to create a 'universal' language; i.e. a language that is easy to learn and speak regardless of background or native language. In this regard it was an amateurish and ignorant attempt, since Esperanto is:

1.) Phonetically challenging for non-Europeans.
2.) A schizophrenic pastiche of grammar borrowed from select Indo-European languages in what I can only assume is a fit of profound ethnocentrism.
3.) Gendered, which is a grammatical structure almost exclusively found in Indo-European languages, but deserves special mention because this introduces cultural difficulties understanding and producing Esperanto as well as sociological controversy. In an artificial language. An artificial language expressly designed to avoid this sort of problem.
4.) Has a vocabulary consisting mostly of English words with an 'o' added to the end so they sound more Italian.

It's ridiculous. You might as well learn Klingon or Sindarin.

bonjorno

The concept of a gender was the most annoying part in learning French and German. Cases made German all that more complex but that's another rant. To this day I still get confused on which (in)definite article to apply to a noun.

In addition to those problems, it also suffered a setback when many of its supporters, including the family of its creator, were killed in the Holocaust (the creator was Jewish, but advocating Esperanto was also enough to get you sent to camp).



Or Na'vi!

Any artificial language will pick up the characteristics of natural language within a generation or two. Not to mention the logistics of making it universal and trying to get people to learn and remember it. Knowing a language isn't like knowing how to ride a bike. If you don't use it your knowledge degrades. If it's a language you learned half-heartedly and never used it daily life, it'll degrade extremely quickly.

Esperanto was the Hindenburg of languages.

We only introduced genders because it sounds so cute when you get them wrong.

The signs on Red Dwarf are in Esperanto.

I've been trying to learn French via Rosetta Stone so that I can communicate with my wife's family & I must say that it's ****ing pissing me off. If I was going to learn a worthless language, it'd probably be one of Tolkien's. Liv Tyler gives me a hard-on when she speaks that gibberish.

Je ne comprend pas pourquoi vous trouvez le français si difficile! Apart la prononciation des 'r', c'est très simple. Le concept qu'il y as des hommes et des femmes et que notre langue les différencies n'est pourtant pas si bizarre!

Dare ga suru toki ni Googleno hon'yaku ga fuhen teki na gengo no nīzu ？

(Who needs universal languages when you have Google Translate?)

oh, not GTA...

I love that I can just about understand that. Huzzah for living with linguists for the last 9 years!

More likely you can understand that because Canadian French is 99% English loanwords. That's why French-French get offended if you speak it: because Canadian French is gutter French.

Because image association approaches to language education are stupid and retarded and the people who come up with them are ugly on the inside and also on the outside, and they have ill-behaved and unkempt children.

Use a conversational approach (i.e. Pimsleur) and supplement it with immersion. If your wife speaks French, get her to only ever speak French when she's at home. You'll be conversational within a month.

While that helps, the fluent speaking wife/closest circle of friends/watching french cinema quite regularly helps as well.

Props for the unkempt children though.

We were just talking about that the other day. I think it's a good idea & we'll probably start tonight. We're going back to France to visit her family in August & I'd love to be able to carry on a decent conversation with them. It was rather frustrating during our last trip because none of them speak English & they were discussing various topics that are of interest to me.


We've been watching a ton of French films. I must admit that I've become a big fan of French cinema (classic & modern).

If just watching movies in another language was enough, I'd be fluent in Japanese by now.

(in b4 weeaboo)

weeaboo

Il n'était pas....difficile. Ok. Il était difficile parce qu'il était quelque chose que je n'écoutais jamais.

I agree with Jon`C's approach of immersion and conversation. Whenever I can, I try to speak with une francophonie in French and lately some of my Spanish speaking coworkers in Spanish. I find I'm picking up more and more of Spanish and not forgetting as much for French.