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Is Esperanto a big part of your life?

by Alkanadi, November 4, 2015

Messages: 57

Language: English

Alkanadi (User's profile) November 4, 2015, 4:51:50 PM

Is Esperanto a big part of your life?

robbkvasnak (User's profile) November 4, 2015, 5:13:15 PM

Esperanto is not a hobby for me - it is a specific, clear program for action - it is for me as a language teacher part of what I see as a solution for the problems faced by people who live in a monocultural, monolingual world and who therefore do not enjoy the fullness of our world.

erinja (User's profile) November 4, 2015, 5:48:14 PM

Your poll doesn't leave much in between "Esperanto is everything" and the fun hobby.

Mine is somewhere in between. It's a big part of my life and if I have kids I will speak to them in Esperanto, because this is a way to include them in a significant portion of my life. But I don't feel like Esperanto is really a hobby, any more than being Jewish is a "hobby". I have my Jewish friends and my Esperanto friends, my Jewish books and my Esperanto books. It is simply incorporated as a part of my life that informs some of my activities and what I do with some of my free time.

Tempodivalse (User's profile) November 4, 2015, 6:06:19 PM

Esperanto is part of my identity, I suppose. I don't know if I would relegate it to the status of 'hobby' - it seems rather more than that, kind of like being multilingual in general is not a hobby.

jefusan (User's profile) November 4, 2015, 7:53:33 PM

Hobby, definitely. It might be more if it fit into other aspects of my life, but it doesn't. None of my friends speak Esperanto. And, frankly, I haven't often found that I have a lot in common with other Esperantists I've met.

Compare that to improv comedy, which I'm sure some friends and family members think of as my hobby. But I met my wife at an improv theater, the majority of my friends and acquaintances are comedians, and I have been paid handsomely to perform. Improv is a huge part of my life. Esperanto, like crossword puzzles, is rewarding in a less practical, more private way.

erinja (User's profile) November 4, 2015, 7:57:11 PM

It's just hard for me to conceive of a language as being a hobby once you have finished learning it.

Language learning - sure, a hobby. But once you already speak it to a decent degree, it's not so much a hobby as a thing you use to do your other hobbies. Reading is a hobby, and an Esperanto speaker who enjoys reading could read Esperanto books. Internet chatting is a hobby, you could do that in Esperanto too. Like crocheting? You could crochet something and then discuss it with your Esperanto friends on an Esperanto group for crochet hobbyists. But a language as a hobby, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

"Doing Esperanto" looks a lot like "doing" any other thing I do in my life, only in a different language (reading, chatting online, meeting friends, tourism, etc).

jefusan (User's profile) November 4, 2015, 8:41:36 PM

erinja:It's just hard for me to conceive of a language as being a hobby once you have finished learning it.

Language learning - sure, a hobby. But once you already speak it to a decent degree, it's not so much a hobby as a thing you use to do your other hobbies. Reading is a hobby, and an Esperanto speaker who enjoys reading could read Esperanto books. Internet chatting is a hobby, you could do that in Esperanto too. Like crocheting? You could crochet something and then discuss it with your Esperanto friends on an Esperanto group for crochet hobbyists. But a language as a hobby, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

"Doing Esperanto" looks a lot like "doing" any other thing I do in my life, only in a different language (reading, chatting online, meeting friends, tourism, etc).
In my case, I'm not that close to being finished. And as it hasn't become part of my day-to-day life in any way, it can't be much more than a hobby.

Alkanadi (User's profile) November 5, 2015, 7:03:43 AM

erinja:But I don't feel like Esperanto is really a hobby, any more than being Jewish is a "hobby".
Interesting point. So it is part of your identity.

johmue (User's profile) November 5, 2015, 7:17:48 AM

Alkanadi:
erinja:But I don't feel like Esperanto is really a hobby, any more than being Jewish is a "hobby".
Interesting point. So it is part of your identity.
I would definetly say it's part of my identity. I wouldn't say Esperanto is a hobby to me. It's more like a cultural background. It's very much like Erinja says.

My hobbies are music, podcasting, programming, electronics, typesetting, traveling, ...

Many of those I am doing inside the Esperanto community. I also speak Esperanto with my girlfriends. So it's really a part of my identity so definetely not just a hobby but it's far from being "everything". There's my friends, my beloved ones, there is my hobbies, there's my job.

sudanglo (User's profile) November 5, 2015, 10:49:09 AM

Curiously, I was at the opticians the other day having my eyes tested for a new pair of glasses, and the optician asked me whether I had any hobbies.

I really had to stop and think whether I could say that Esperanto was one of my hobbies.

I suppose that a denaska Esperanto-speaker would have some difficulty in saying that for him or her Esperanto was a hobby, just as an Englishman wouldn't say that English was a hobby.

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