"So, what do you like to do for fun?"
"Oh, I play tennis"
"Good deal! That's a great pastime. OK, how about you?"
"Uh, I'm into video games. I'll play my favorites for days on end."
"Yeah, I like those, too. And you? What do you like to do for fun?"
"I'm learning guitar. It's hard, but kind of rewarding."
"Excellent! And, finally, how about you?"
"I'm learning Esperanto."
(All in unison) "WHAT? Why are you wasting your time with THAT?"

Hehe, this couldn't be closer to the truth.

But to be fair, I've notice, at least where I live, that spending too much time on educating yourself in general is looked down upon as well. If I tell people about my secret infatuation with reading the Science/Technology and Politics subreddits on reddit.com , they treat me like I'm too booky and tell me that I need hobbies. This is probably a region specific thing in my case..but it's still annoying because I do have hobbies (e.g. Tennis, Chess, Reading, Programming, etc.) and learning about science and national events is just as much of a hobby as anything else..

I think you'll find that many people consider sitting and watching six solid seasons of "Lost" on Hulu, from series premiere to series finale, episode after made-up-as-they-went-along episode, to be a more valuable use of their time than learning Esperanto.

Lol...well, I mean, there's nothing wrong with liking those shows. Heck, I watch Real Housewives..all of the time...

I don't think that Esperanto has a realistic chance of achieving any kind of widespread success EVER, and certainly not within the lifetime on anyone on this forum. But some people disagree with me. Each government wants to promote its own language, so there is no real incentive to push for a neutral language. Even governments with a language that isn't widely spoken view it as a big victory to have their language added to a list of 20 or so official languages of an international organization.

I actively avoid telling people anything about Esperanto. In most cases the reaction isn't resoundingly negative (more like "Hm, that's interesting" rather than "that's a huge waste of time" ) but people tend to make jokes about it after (Hey Erin, how do you say that in espe-rant-o? or Erin, what's the name of that language you speak again? Esperanza? Erin speaks this weird language. etc.). I'm sick of the jokes, they aren't funny, because I don't view Esperanto as a joke (and though I speak Italian at a decent conversational level, no one ever asks me how to say something random in Italian, and no one ever mentions to anyone else that I speak it - funny that, Italian isn't a joke to them).

I live in Washington DC, and no one has ever said anything bad to me if I told them my hobbies were reading and language learning. This area is highly educated and pretty government-centric; because if I told people my hobbies were reading the news (also true), that would be considered totally normal here, especially if I said that politics was a particular interest (that would probably be false). But depending on the person, I tell them different hobbies - all things that are true, but the list is edited for the audience. I recently started a new job. No one there knows about the Esperanto, though I did have to be a little creative when talking about reasons why I visited certain places (that I visited for Esperanto reasons). I am pretty active in Esperanto and it's not always easy to talk about aspects of my life without mentioning that, but after the Esperanto jokes in my last workplace, even from friendly colleagues, I don't feel like letting anyone know about it again.

However, I learned Esperanto starting when I was 14, and I can honestly say it was one of the best uses of time I ever made. I have travelled to so many places, met so many cool people, and done lots of things that I wouldn't have done without Esperanto. My parents didn't say much when I learned it, maybe thought it was a little strange, but they think it's really cool that I was able to do so much with it once I'd learned, and they're positive about it now (though not remotely interested in learning, not that I ever asked them to).

I don't tend to be very evangelical with Esperanto. If someone asks what it is I tell them, but I don't encourage them to learn it. If they ask for resources for learning it, of course I'd be happy to give that to them. It tends to turn people off if you seem pushy about it.

As regards whether Esperanto will ever 'catch on', this is very much a matter of faith. Though some might argue that it already has.

It is simply impossible to say. There are so many changes that have taken place so quickly that any predictions of what the world will be like in say 30 years time are highly problematic.

Few of the predictions some 30 years ago have been realised and many things simply not thought of then have however come to pass.

Remember that even the head of IBM famously once said that he thought the world would not need more than a handful of computers.

So Erinja's prediction that Esperanto has no realistic chance of achieving any kind of widespread success EVER is as uncertain as the most devoted Esperantist's prediction that we are approaching a tipping point.

The only rational position for an Esperantist is to see himself as a guardian of the language husbanding its development and laying the foundations for the day when the Zeitgeist changes.

Recent developments like the launching of Lernu.net, the posting on the net of PMEG and NPIV. the development of software for machine translation into and from Esperanto, and many other initiatives, past and present, stem from a view that Esperanto is more than a casual pastime.

Learning Esperanto doesn't commit yourself to this view, but you will find that many Esperantists see themselves as involved in something much more significant than Language-learning geekery.

sudanglo:The only rational position for an Esperantist is to see himself as a guardian of the language husbanding its development and laying the foundations for the day when the Zeitgeist changes.

And what if an Esperantist doesn't see himself thus? Is this person adopting an irrational position?

sudanglo:So Erinja's prediction that Esperanto has no realistic chance of achieving any kind of widespread success EVER is as uncertain as the most devoted Esperantist's prediction that we are approaching a tipping point.

This isn't true. This relies on the assumption that things are equally like to happen as they are to not happen, which in the case of widespread adoption is emphatically not the case. If one were inclined and had the historical and mathematical background for it, one could probably come up with an estimate of the likelihood of any proposal/movement/item ever meeting widespread success -- and I strongly suspect that the likelihood of Esperanto meeting such success would be calculated as statistically negligible, basically zero.

My friends I've told at least pretend to understand my reasoning behind it. A few have said they may look into learning it but no successful "conversions" so far.
My parents don't know, I figure they'd tell me to just learn Spanish instead. A SO of mine also seemed to think learning a natural one was more worthwhile but got more accepting after explaining its benefits more.

I think people just react negatively in general because they don't see learning a language as "fun". So add that with "fake language" they see no benefits.

Zafur:I think people just react negatively in general because they don't see learning a language as "fun". So add that with "fake language" they see no benefits.

I think this is a large part of the reason. In the US, at least, learning foreign languages (with the possible exception of Spanish) is generally not highly valued. A lot of people have the attitude of "oh, doesn't the whole world pretty much speak English?", and to learn a language that has at best ~1 million speakers doesn't strike anyone as useful.

I suspect the stereotype goes deeper than that, though. Because the language did not evolve into existence over centuries, but was instead created by a single man (and only then started to evolve as "natural" languages did), there's this tendency to think that it can't possibly be "serious" and "real", and hence is a "fake toy" similar to Pig Latin. This is due to simple ignorance about the history of Esperanto. Sadly, it's a very human tendency to have critical opinions on subjects one has no understanding of (even Noam Chomsky fell into this trap once when he famously claimed EO was "not a language", asserting that EO was based on Spanish - but Zamenhof had no knowledge of Spanish).

tommjames:

sudanglo:The only rational position for an Esperantist is to see himself as a guardian of the language husbanding its development and laying the foundations for the day when the Zeitgeist changes.

And what if an Esperantist doesn't see himself thus? Is this person adopting an irrational position?

There are those who take the position that over the course of its history the Esperanto community has developed things and connections worth preserving and worth knowing whether there's a fina venko in our immediate future or not...that the community itself is worthy of being kept alive for its own sake. That's a slightly different kind of rationale for guardianship than what sudanglo is talking about, but either way you still end up with a language that's actually alive somewhere in the world and not gathering dust on a reference library shelf.

Reading this thread, I feel like I've gotten off light. The worst anybody's told me is that I should take all that "wasted" Esperanto time and learn Arabic for a government service job instead. But it was just the one guy. Everybody else already knows I'm weird.