As you might have read in my latest update post or podcast, I have decided to embark on a 3 month impromptu challenge to speak Esperanto. I will be doing this alongside my Russian studies, and so am challenging myself not only to learn a language in 3 months, but also whilst studying two languages at the same time. I will use the knowledge from my ~5 or so previous months to hopefully succeed in Esperanto in 3 months.
Why Esperanto
I had first come across Esperanto via Benny Lewis on his Blog, where he talked about the benefits of learning this constructed language. By then however, I wasn’t really interested in con-languages – probably mostly because I knew nothing about them and they seemed a bit unnecessary, when I hadn’t learnt that many natural languages yet.
However, as I came to Polyglot Berlin (my trip report) and got to meet a lot of Esperantists, it really changed my idea about the language. The more I talked to people, I got more and more interested in actually learning it. Every single Esperanto speaker I have talked to has been so friendly and helpful, which I’m sure you will experience for other languages as well, but I was very impressed by people’s patience and willingness to help.
Apart from that I also heard that learning Esperanto will help you in other languages. I do not really understand why yet, but I guess learning a language is a “win” which motivates you to move on in your other languages. Esperanto also has the benefit of being very easy to learn, so it should be very realistic to reach a high level in 3 months.
Daily routine
I’m going to goldlist all prefixes, suffixes and grammatical endings and then the most used ~500 word stems. According to the Esperanto Society of Chicago a vocabulary of just 564 words provides a 80% comprehension. This is about 1/4 of what you would need in a typical natural languages. Additionally, with knowledge of the suffixes and prefixes you will be able to deduce many more words than if you just did a word-based repetition, like Memrise or Anki word lists.
Additionally I will watch pasporta al la tuta mondo, which is a 16 part video course entirely in Esperanto. Saluton ŝafo!
And last but certainly not least I will practice speaking and writing with some of my Esperanto friends and also in the aligatoreĵo on Facebook (-ejo suffix denotes a place).
90 day goal and the reward for achieving it
My goal after 90 days is to speak Esperanto for 15 minutes on video. I will publish the results on the YouTube channel, where you can also follow my progress along the way.
I’m not a huge fan of buying big things and rewarding myself with it, so for my reward I came up with the idea to host a small party with friends where I got a local baker to make me an Esperanto cake. At the party I will do a speech in Esperanto, and if I fail to do that – along with me failing to speak for 15 minutes on video I will accept my fate and slam my head into the cake, after which we will all get drunk to mend the pain from not eating the lovely cake.
However, I plan to succeed so when I do succeed I will hopefully get to enjoy a great party with friends and a delicious cake.
Do you want to join the Add1Challenge?
If you want to join the add 1 challenge, you can still send in your application until this Friday. All you have to do is sign up via this link.
My next update on this 3 month project will include my first impressions of Esperanto 
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