Hi everyone,

I'm having a bit of trouble making progress in learning Esperanto - OK, more than a bit. I'm having awful "eterna komencanto" visions, and I'd be glad for any advice that you all would be willing to give.

My main problem, I think, is that I'm rather overwhelmed. I am almost done with ELNA's free postal course (mailed in lesson 9 yesterday and still can't form a coherent sentence), but I also have Teach Yourself Esperanto, Jen Nia Mondo, Step-by-Step in Esperanto, Esperanto: Learning and Using the International Language, and others sitting on my bookshelf, glaring at me, and making me generally uncomfortable, as well as the courses here waiting to be done. I feel like I should work through every single one, thus my overwhelmedness. Has anyone else felt like that at first? How does one decide, "OK, I'll work through this book and then I'll do this and read this..." and so on - sort it all out into something comprehensible?

Also, relating to what I said above about not being able to form a coherent sentence, I am wondering about ways to improve there. I can usually get the gist of easy stories and such with the help of my trusty dictionary, but when I try to think about saying something in Esperanto, my brain seizes up. Memorizing vocabulary is not a problem - putting the words together, that's the problem. I've seen people recommend reading as helpful. I believe I also saw someone here mention writing (on a blog, I think, but I can't remember who it was!), and things like listening to music and podcasts. I do listen to music and podcasts and try to read (and lurk here quite a lot). I'd like to try writing, but I'm afraid that with no one to check my writing, it wouldn't do any good at all! I would ask if I could post things that I write here, but I'm worried that you'd all get tired of seeing, "Mi nomiĝas Amanda. Mi havas hundon. Mi..."

I'm sure that the whole topic of "how to learn" had been talked to death, but I would be grateful if you all could give me some ideas - perhaps how you started off ("I worked through book X and then I ... " etc.).

I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that going to the LK and NASK next month will give me a boost, but besides that, I'm pretty much floundering about!

Thanks everyone.

You are talking about making the leap between grasping the way the language works (relatively easy) and acquiring fluency.

I would guess that for many Esperantists of my generation fluency was acquired by going to congresses and trying to speak it. However, that's easier for someone living in Europe.

Nowadays, of course, you can look for a Skype partner for practice sessions.

You can help yourself along by talking to yourself in Esperanto, or writing down what you want to say, and you can check, by posting in the Forum and asking for comments/corrections.

The key to fluency is active production, not just passive absorption.

You need to write. Until I started writing regularly, I was in the same boat you are.

I personally decided to write a blog, and yet not concern myself with writing interesting things - rather than a journal, it was just to be a public record of my lessons. My blog in the early days was REALLY boring to read. Didn't matter. Interesting wasn't the point. I actually recommend doing something like that, although ultimately whether you post what you write publicly is up to you. But with that as a backdrop, my advice is...

Write a paragraph (just a couple of sentences) in English, then translate it into Esperanto. When you are writing the English paragraph, do NOT dumb it down in any way. It should just be regular English, about anything you want, and not oriented around simple stuff that's "easy" to translate. Just write a normal paragraph. Then translate it.

When you start to translate, you will not know a lot of words at first. That's what your dictionaries are for. You will not know how to word some things grammatically. That's what the textbooks are for. Learn to look stuff up, and prepare yourself to do it a LOT.

Then, when you are done, read through what you've written and correct any errors. Then read through it again, actively looking for mistakes you missed during the first pass. Correct those, too. Come back to it in a couple of hours and read it again, and correct any additional errors you WILL now notice you missed earlier. Your goal should be to come up with something written in PERFECT Esperanto. Take as many passes over it as you need to; it does not have to be perfect all at once, but you want it to end up there. Make sure you know the reason for every single word you've put in there, and that the words work together properly. Run through all the rules: do the adjectives agree with the nouns? Do you have accusative -n's everywhere they should be? And so on. Look CRITICALLY, and at a tremendously high magnification level.

Don't give it to someone else to correct. YOU correct it. You've got the textbooks and dictionaries. Use them. A LOT. Is there anything in what you've written you are unsure about? Look it up! Those books don't help anyone if they're sitting on a shelf! (Certainly when you are finished with the process, you can show what you've written to others. But make it as good as you possibly can first.)

The first paragraph I wrote in my blog was three sentences long, about how I live in a blue house, and it took me over an hour to do. I then spent the next several days finding errors in it and correcting them. It's actually shocking just how many errors you (or, at least, *I*) can pack into a small space, and how well they can hide from inexperienced eyes. But root them out.

The next paragraph I wrote took nearly the same length of time to compose. The one after that, too. It is HARD at first, and time consuming. But as I wrote these paragraphs, they did start to go a little faster, because after a while I started to use words I'd used before, and tenses I'd used before, and participles I'd used before, and after a while I wasn't looking up stuff nearly as much.

After a while, don't write your paragraphs out in English first. Just write them straight into Esperanto. And since you won't be finding nearly as many structural errors as you used to, start looking for stylistic errors - ways that you can improve HOW you are saying it, rather than WHAT you are saying. Now that all the pieces fit together, how can you make them as concise as possible, or as clear as possible, or as expressive as possible, or as... etc. Always try and think of ways to make what you've written better, and even if you see a mistake in there many weeks after you've written it: correct it.

You won't learn Esperanto until you use it. So use it. And never just write something and throw it out there and consider yourself done with it. Keep polishing it until it gleams, and if that goes slowly at first, that's because laying groundwork always does. (And, really, if you do this every day for a couple of weeks, it won't be going all that slowly for you any more.)

That's pretty much how I learned.

Second Language Acquisition is my specialty. I wrote a dissertation on it.
You are in what Jim Cummins calls "the silent period", that is your brain is still trying to make sense of a new system that seems somewhat chaotic. Eventually, you will see patterns. Try corresonding with someone in Esperanto. Of course, if you can find a local group, that would be helpful. The more exposure you have to Esperanto, the more quickly you will understand the grammatical patterns of the language. Go on Youtube and look for films and music in Esperanto. One great song is under "tutmonda muziko". They sing and have the texts as subtitles. That is how I acquired Spanish. I bought CDs in Spanish with the accompanying texts written out. Human brains like songs and rhymes. I am sure that there are people on here who will gladly help you. I know I would.

Ankaŭ mi estas komencanto, do vi prenu mian konsilon kun salero... [I'm also a beginner, so take my advice with a grain of salt]

I've attempted to learn Esperanto four or five times in my life, and each time I've done better and gotten farther and learned some more. But whan helped me the most wasn't learning Esperanto, it was learning some Swedish. Swedish is similar to English in its irregularity -- there are lots of rules and idioms you simply have to remember. And yet, I found my progress in Swedish to be "pli rapide ol" my attempts at Esperanto. I realized it was because I approached the language much as I do my native English: an incomprehensible mess of words and phrases that simply need to be memorized.

I am now approaching Esperanto from a similar bent -- obviously I'm still trying to learn grammar and all the elegant structure of the language, but I'm looking it as an exercise in memorization -- "this way is right, this way is wrong, you needn't understand exactly why just yet." And it's helping. It's tempting to expect unreasonable progress, I think, in Esperanto due to its highly logical construction, but at the end of the day it's just another language that you'll pick up primarily by exposing yourself to it and memorizing. For me, this means that I don't just practice root words (I study both tranĉi and tranĉilo, even though they should both be clear from just tranĉi if I had a perfect robot brain) and I memorize phrases like "bonan nokton" without putting in too much thought into it.

This has helped me reach a greater level of understanding in a shorter time because when I see "Kiel vi fartas?" I'm not thinking: "Okay, so... Kiel is 'how'... or is that 'where'... and 'fartas' is to be doing" instead I just memorized that it means, "How are you?" Sure, I can dissect why it's the way it is, and it's certainly something I do, but it's not what I work on.

I dunno if this is at all helpful to you, but I just thought I'd share my own thoughts.

One other remark: I've tried most if not all of those books you mention through the years as well as many of the online and e-correspondence courses, and am currently having the most success with Learning and Using out of any of them. But I imagine this is a very personal preference -- still, Learning and Using has small sentence building exercises after the introduction of every grammatical concept, which might be helpful, plus it has a good reader for the last third of the book.

"Learning and Using" is the book I always recommend to beginners looking for a textbook, I like its mix of a course with a grammar, small dictionary, and reading materials. A great all-in-one book.

Some people do better with a grammatical approach, some people do better with a logical approach. You have to sort of figure out your own learning style and apply it.

But courses only take you so far. Like some others have mentioned, you should be writing a lot, that's how you'll progress. When I was a beginner I practiced writing by finding penpals to write to and translating random short texts.

There is text all around us - songs that we listen to, preparation instructions on a package of food, informational signs posted around, etc. Try to translate some of those short texts in your head. Even if you're just waiting for your water to boil before you dump in a box of pasta, read the pasta box, and think to yourself "Hm, boil for 9 to 11 minutes in salted water, how would I say that in Esperanto?"

Talk to yourself in Esperanto. Talk to your pets (if you have any) in Esperanto. Imagine you had an Esperanto-speaking guest, and think of what you would tell them if they were staying in your house. (This is the bathroom. You can find ice cream in the freezer. I recommend the cafe on the corner.)

But finding a penpal who doesn't speak a language you speak is a great way to practice. You can't resort to English. And you tend to talk about things you care about, which helps build your useful vocabulary, your vocabulary of things that you are interested in talking about, rather than building a vocabulary of words that someone else finds useful - like an old Italian textbook that I learned from, that taught the words "chimney", "maid", and "ashtray" relatively early.)

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Most people don't reach fluency in Esperanto because they did a whole big stack of courses. They reach fluency because they used the language. I am currently having an analogous experience, I'm in training to be a patent examiner. They started us off with lots of courses on the relevant laws and principles, and there were a few examples. Everything seemed pretty clear and straightforward. Then we sat down to start examining some actual patents, and suddenly, you realize that you know nothing. You have so many questions, you don't feel like you can do the simplest thing. THAT is when you can really get more out of the classes on the relevant laws and principles, because you can relate it to something you're actually working on.

It's the same with a language. Doing a ton of exercises will only take you so far. You need to jump in and start practicing the language, even if you're messing everything up and people can barely understand you. The more you practice, the better sense you'll have of the things you need to work on more. THEN you can go back to your books, and learn in a more targeted way. "I want to learn how to say this kind of sentence", for example. The books will never tell you every detail, you need to use the knowledge to find out where the holes are, then go about filling those holes.

(this is why I normally recommend that beginners get a dictionary with a grammar guide. I can't even tell you how much I used the grammar guide in my old Wells dictionary, it was absolutely essential as a reference when I struggled to write coherent texts in Esperanto)

miamaslegi:..I also have Teach Yourself Esperanto, Jen Nia Mondo, Step-by-Step in Esperanto, Esperanto: Learning and Using the International Language, and others sitting on my bookshelf, glaring at me, and making me generally uncomfortable

Remember that it's not necessary to have closely studied all of them. I have worked through Teach Yourself Esperanto and Jen Nia Mondo (with the CDs - make sure you have the audio material with this course), and later went through the reading sections of Richardson, but I have used Step by step only for reference.

My suggestion is to take one book at a time. Decide which one suits you as a beginner, whether Richardson, TYE or JNM. If you are working through a course that uses one of them, the decision will be made for you. Work through it carefully, and then you will be in a much better position to decide how to use the others.

May I share my experience? It is similar to that of xdzt. Let me say that I like the Lernu website although I don't make use of all the courses. For example, I just cannot get interested in the Gerda Malaperis course. It comes across as artificial and I just cannot relate to it. I have tried several times. And while I like Lernu and enjoy the forums, I rarely, and I mean rarely, post anything. I don't know if there is a time limit on logging onto the site. About a year ago, I registered on Lernu. Then last week I tried to log on and was refused admission. So I registered again. Is there a six month or a year time limit on this site?

I have most of the books mentioned by the other posters on this thread and I use them for reference. I like to take particular sentences from various books and memorize them. I have a list of hundreds of sentences and phrases that I go over periodically. Learn them once and you don't have to spend a lot of time going over them again. Sentences and phrases have patterns. By changing words, you can obtain a lot of variety. That may be an old style of learning a language but it seems to work for me. I like the dialogs in the Richardson book. I also like Jen Nia Mondo I & II and learn sentences from both books.

Here are five examples containing about 32 words. They provide a template. Learn more vocabulary, more grammar, etc.:
La festo kontentigis la infanojn.
Li laboradis de frua mateno ĝis malfrua nokto.
Verŝajne vi havas la malĝustan numeron.
Ŝi estas malfeliĉa, kaj tial ŝi ploras.
Li neniam antaŭe havis ferion, sed li decidis ĉi-jare iri al la marbordo.

You get the picture. It especially helps me with correlatives. And it helps in writing a blog. But it does not help with hearing the spoken language. It also helps to read the "In Esperanto" forums although I see a lot of things on them that I suspect are wrong. Learning the wrong way to say something isn't very productive.

Keep plugging away, that is all that I can say. You are not alone. I thought both RiotNrrd's and erinja's advice was interesting and useful. There are good ways to learn and bad ways. I may be doing it the bad way.

Maybe you could try what's reccomended here. Certain things you won't really be able to do like watch movies, but overall I really agree with Khatz's philosophy and method. Oh, and here's an overview of his method/strategy for learning languages.

miamaslegi:I would ask if I could post things that I write here, but I'm worried that you'd all get tired of seeing, "Mi nomiĝas Amanda. Mi havas hundon. Mi..."

Don't worry about that. Most of the users of this website are glad to see others eager to learn Esperanto and are happy to help. Chances are if you have a question, no matter how basic, there are a lot of other people out there who have the same question and will benefit from you asking it and the responses generated.

As soon as possible, start posting in the Esperanto forums, even if your posts are only a simple sentence or two at first. As in any learning endeavor, you can only improve through practice, and writing posts forces you to look up the words that you need to use. For me, looking up and using words in an attempt to communicate planted those words more firmly in my memory that simply reading, doing excercises, or listening to videos and songs.