Mi pardonpetas, but I'd like to know why do you (usonanoj, angloj kaj aliaj anglalingvanoj) learn Esperanton? Now your language is the most uzata over the world.

Terurĉjo:Mi pardonpetas, but I'd like to know why do you (usonanoj, angloj kaj aliaj anglalingvanoj) learn Esperanton? Now your language is the most uzata over the world.

In my opinion one of the most important reasons is idealism, that moved Zamenhof himself. In my case, I was drawn to a copy of Teach Yourself Esperanto in an Oxfam bookshop. One thing led to another. I am an admirer of Zamenhof, of course.
Also, communication with an international community. But I will leave it to those with first hand experience to say more about this.

I’m not a native English speaker, so I cannot answer.

However, I came across this text: Why does an American Use Esperanto? (Kial usonano uzas Esperanton?).
What do you think of it?

Mutusen: I came across this text: Why does an American Use Esperanto? (Kial usonano uzas Esperanton?).
What do you think of it?

This looks excellent. I wonder whether it is available as a printed book.

Coming from a predominately English speaking region of Canada I can give you a few reasons.

After taking French for 5 years in public school, I, along with most of my classmates could barely put together a sentence in french, let alone engage in casual conversation. It was almost a complete waste of time. I say "almost" because even though the attempt was unsuccessful it left me with a sense of unfulfillment. Since that time I have occasionally got the urge to rectify this unfinished business. Unfortunately, every time I would begin self study of the French language, I would get to the point where I felt I had accomplished so little for all of the effort I had put in. Discouraged, I would eventually give up.

Then one day while browsing through wikipedia, I came across the article on Esperanto. I read about the possible propaedeutic value of Esperanto and thought it might help me better learn French. Interested, I began to study the language.

It was amazing! As I learned, I got more and more excited, I was actually understanding it and making noticeable progress! It was fun!

To cut this short, I, as an English speaker decided to learn Esperanto because:

1)it's possible propaedeutic value, to aid in learning other languages
2)general interest in languages
3)international, people from many countries speak Esperanto
4)Pasporta Servo
5)was easy to begin learning!

I'm a native English speaker.

In brief:
- I'm interested in languages in general. My initial reason for learning Esperanto was that I wanted to learn a language easy enough that I could become fluent in it.

- Everybody does not speak English, contrary to the opinions of some native English speakers. I have been in many situations in foreign countries where the people did not speak English, even in wealthy, Western European countries (particularly in southern Europe, not so much in the north)

- Esperanto is a great way to meet local people while travelling abroad. As an Esperanto speaker, I can contact foreign Esperanto speakers prior to my trip and arrange to meet with them when I visit their country. You can't really do this with English. Esperanto has a culture associated with it that includes enthusiasm for meeting up with foreigners, just because you both speak the same language. English does not have a culture like that. A speaker of English can expect to receive no special favors when travelling abroad. But I think few people learn Esperanto for this reason, I think that most people only find out about this aspect of Esperanto after learning the language, as I did.

- This is really just an aside that has nothing to do with your question, but it's important to realize that even in the US, not everyone speaks English, or speaks well enough to communicate effectively. Sometimes it is hard to ask a question or place an order at a restaurant or coffee shop because the cashier's English is very limited. My mom has even encountered a cashier who was not familiar enough with US money to know which coins to give her as change. This is a linguistic issue for new immigrants, because US coins generally have words written on them, not numbers. Our coins read "One Cent", "Five Cents", "One Dime", and "Quarter Dollar". I think that more and more Americans are finding language to be a problem when communicating with their employees, particularly in certain industries (construction, landscaping, service/hospitality). To these Americans, learning a foreign language (Spanish) is practical and necessary, in spite of the political rhetoric that you hear all the time ("They came to our country, they need to learn our language!" "We should stop providing government services in Spanish because it's too easy to live in this country without learning English!" etc). In some ways it's a weird contrast. People say "Everyone speaks English, so why learn a foreign language?", at the same time that they are complaining "Why don't these immigrants learn English?"

erinja:"They came to our country, they need to learn our language!"

Reminds me of this

Terurĉjo:Mi pardonpetas, but I'd like to know why do you (usonanoj, angloj kaj aliaj anglalingvanoj) learn Esperanton? Now your language is the most uzata over the world.

Esperanto appealed to me because it was a foreign language that I could actually learn.

I studied German and French for YEARS, and cannot speak either one at the same level as a native two-year-old might. A few years ago I decided that I didn't like that fact, and felt that I wanted to learn SOMETHING, at least, to a level of some competence. I tried brushing up on my German, but quickly got bored with it. Too much effort for too little gain. So I started looking at the artificial languages, and tried to learn lojban. But I found lojban to be just as difficult as German and French, even if the lojban community claims that it's a lot easier. After spending something like an hour trying to translate the sentence "I live in a blue house" into lojban (this after several WEEKS of study), I realized that I was going nowhere fast with it, too.

So I kept looking, came across Esperanto, and immediately made quite rapid progress with it. The difference was amazing. I was reading the news stories at Ĝangalo after only two weeks of maybe 15 minutes per day of study. I needed a dictionary, of course, to look up unfamiliar words, but still... in two weeks I had progressed from no knowledge of the language at all to being capable of understanding material NOT written for beginners.

The fact that English (or something called "English", even if it bears only a passing resemblance to what I speak) is spoken "everywhere" is meaningless to me. Honestly, the level of competence in English appears to be generally pretty low outside of the primary English-speaking countries (and is frequently quite low in many where English is supposedly an official language, such as India and Singapore), and I find speaking English with people who are at a much lower level than myself to be frustrating at best. I want to be able to speak with people from other countries at the SAME general level, without language getting in the way. I cannot do that with English. I CAN do that with Esperanto.

I mean, you and I have had quite a number of conversations. And I don't speak Russian AT ALL. "Da", "nyet", and "dasvidanya" (which I obviously don't even know how to spell) maybe. Certainly not if written in Cyrillic. But Esperanto has worked quite well as a communication medium between us. And those conversational opportunities are exactly why I learned it.

Terurĉjo:Mi pardonpetas, but I'd like to know why do you (usonanoj, angloj kaj aliaj anglalingvanoj) learn Esperanton? Now your language is the most uzata over the world.

Although I am a native speaker of English, it is not my favorite language in the world and I don't care to see it become more important than every other language.

English may be the most widely spoken language in the world, but there are a lot of people who speak it very badly. I know because I have spoken with a lot of people both in person and on the internet who have learned English as a second language, and many times it is almost impossible to make out what they're trying to say. For most non-native English speakers it would be a better use of their time to learn an easy language (like Esperanto) that was designed specifically for the purpose of easy international communication.

I had been studying Esperanto in my spare time for about 4 months when I started using it to communicate in chatrooms and instant messaging. I had been studying Spanish for several years before I reached a level where I could that, and from what I've gathered Spanish is generally an easier language to learn than English, since it is more logical and it has perfect phonemic orthography (whereas English has absolutely terrible phonemic orthography). That helped put things in perspective for me. I think an easy constructed language like Esperanto would be better for everyone, not just non-English speakers.

RiotNrrd:
The fact that English (or something called "English", even if it bears only a passing resemblance to what I speak) is spoken "everywhere" is meaningless to me. Honestly, the level of competence in English appears to be generally pretty low outside of the primary English-speaking countries (and is frequently quite low in many where English is supposedly an official language, such as India and Singapore), and I find speaking English with people who are at a much lower level than myself to be frustrating at best. I want to be able to speak with people from other countries at the SAME general level, without language getting in the way. I cannot do that with English. I CAN do that with Esperanto.

Yes, I completely agree with that. People like to say that English is spoken all over the world, but a large number of the people who have learned English as a second-language don't speak it well enough to where you can have an enjoyable conversation with them.

English might be easier to learn at a basic level than most other languages in the world, but I still don't think it's the best option or even a good option for facilitating global communication.