erinja:
I am not big on carrying signs and handing out pamphlets, I am an understated person, but I like to speak Esperanto when doing ordinary things out in public. Occasionally you get asked what language it is and it starts an interesting little conversation.

With whom are you speaking Esperanto out and about?

I'm rather introverted - not as much as in childhood, but still introverted - and I find that using languages in my teens helped me break through awful shyness barriers. I think it's worth promoting Esperanto in the way Sudanglo suggests. In places like the UK and the U.S. (where a lot of monolingualism is perceived) people learning the 'more useful' languages like e.g. French and German, often don't have much opportunity to really use them; not much more than Esperanto. Often it is student speaking to student.

In fact I can't think of a better language for adult learners in particular. And the desire is there; it's not uncommon among English natives to hear people expressing the wish that they could speak another language, or even stick with learning for more than a few weeks/months.

Vestitor:With whom are you speaking Esperanto out and about?

A little with my husband, I really should do that more but it is easy to be lazy because his Esperanto isn't great and he gets frustrated and switches back to English pretty quickly. With the one or two local Esperanto friends I have. We don't get together a lot but we do use at least some Esperanto each time we meet, though we are all native-English. With Esperanto friends on road trips to or from Esperanto events. Stop at a rest stop, pick up some coffee, talk in Esperanto while we are going about our business. With the occasional foreign traveller who comes to DC and is looking to meet up with Esperanto speakers. I am not always able to make it to these meetings but it's another opportunity.

I have Esperanto friends in a variety of cities and I sometimes try to meet up with them when I visit their cities for whatever reason, we'll go out to a restaurant or a cafe and speak Esperanto (or some Esperanto and some English). As a beginner, before I travelled somewhere, if I knew I was going to have any time, I used to contact random Esperantists in the city I was visiting to see if they wanted to meet up. I pretty much only do that with random people in foreign countries now but I enjoy meeting up with Esperanto friends and speaking some Esperanto at home.

It's not every day, it's not even every week, but it's at least a few times a year. It helps to be well connected to your local Esperanto community, if you have one, or to make the effort to hook up with the local Esperanto community of a place you're visiting.

It's super hard to interest Americans in learning a second language, let alone one that doesn't have prestige or uses in business.

The desire to speak a second language is a desire to already know one, not to go through the process of acquiring one.

devilyoudont:It's super hard to interest Americans in learning a second language...

Esperanto needs to have some tangible benefits attached to it.

Alkanadi:

devilyoudont:It's super hard to interest Americans in learning a second language...

Esperanto needs to have some tangible benefits attached to it.

I think Esperanto's ability to enhance cognition is an immediate benefit that more people should consider. For example, the table words. Had I not learned Esperanto, I would not have realized that who is to everybody as when is to always. Esperanto has helped me understand English a lot better, more so than French helped me, because of its clean structure. I have also heard that it serves as a useful "pivot language", making third and fourth language acquisition easier.

Esperantujo could benefit from making these cognitive enhancements more widely understood and embraced.

The desire to speak a second language is a desire to already know one, not to go through the process of acquiring one.

This seems very plausible and suggests a propaganda angle.

Having identified someone with the afore-mentioned desire, we should perhaps emphasize just how hard it is to acquire a working knowledge of a foreign national language to conversational level, and then suggest Esperanto as an alternative.

So the message is: learning another language is hard - the only language which gives you a chance of being able to make conversation in it within 6 months is Esperanto.

So instead of rabbiting on about how easy Esperanto is, we should start from the position that any learning any foreign language is difficult, but the one that requires least effort is nia kara lingvo.

It's a hard sell. Every language, including Esperanto, takes effort. And a lot of people aren't even willing to put in the effort necessary to learn Esperanto -- a language with few speakers, who you have to actively search out, a language with no discernible commercial benefit. Even if a language were as useful as Spanish and as easy as Esperanto, I think it still would not be very widely learned in the anglosphere. English speakers think everyone speaks English, so they think they don't need to learn anything because they are used to others learning our language.

Or else the old double standard. "Why don't those immigrants learn English?? They must be lazy", but simultaneously, "I don't need to learn a foreign language. Everyone speaks English when you go abroad" (I guess other countries keep all their English speakers at home and export the people who refuse to learn English to the English-speaking countries?)

On the one hand, we have a lot of tourist places where English is the accepted auxiliary language; hotels, restaurants, train stations, taxi services, sightseeing spots and shops all have English speakers among them, wherever you go. This is because tourists who go abroad use English as an auxiliary language to communicate to the people in the hotels, restaurants, taxi services, train stations and sightseeing spots. This then causes tourists whose first language isn't English to learn English so they can speak English to people whose first language isn't English.
So, the following people speak English (according to what I just said): tourists and people who work in the tourism branch, who just so happen to be the same people as the people who the Americans will speak to during their world-trip. This is why they think EVERYONE speaks English: because everyone is just everyone they have spoken to in another country.
The problem here is that they don't wish to communicate with the locals. They wish to look at things eat nice food and sleep all day, for which they don't need Esperanto, but English.
It's sad.

Also, when, for instance, Mexicans move into America they *usually* go to work with other Mexicans, live in Mexican communities and thus, they have no need to know English, except for official papers and that stuff, but if that's all, there are plenty of translators who speak both English and Spanish.

EratoNysiad:Also, when, for instance, Mexicans move into America they *usually* go to work with other Mexicans, live in Mexican communities and thus, they have no need to know English, except for official papers and that stuff, but if that's all, there are plenty of translators who speak both English and Spanish.

This is a bit off topic but free English classes for immigrants are usually filled up in a second. There is huge demand for such classes but supply is another matter, plus time to learn. Just so you know. It is not actually easy to live in the US with limited or no English, not as much stuff is in other languages as people might think, even if you live in an ethnic community who shares your language. You end up using your kid as a translator an awful lot, it's hard on the parents and hard on the kid.

EratoNysiad:So, the following people speak English (according to what I just said): tourists and people who work in the tourism branch, who just so happen to be the same people as the people who the Americans will speak to during their world-trip. This is why they think EVERYONE speaks English: because everyone is just everyone they have spoken to in another country.
The problem here is that they don't wish to communicate with the locals. They wish to look at things eat nice food and sleep all day, for which they don't need Esperanto, but English.
It's sad.

Well, that's not the entire picture concerning the Netherlands. Your post implies that it's chiefly foreign people who make no effort, but the truth is that conversing with locals is very difficult for even someone staying longer than a holiday. The main reason being that Dutch people, in the large cities, are singularly obsessed with wanting to speak English (often not half as good as they imagine, I might add) and offer limited opportunities for learners. This was much less the case just 20 years ago.

It may be old-fashioned and unpopular in this era of self-propelling media-market-choice democracy, but sometimes people really actually don't know what is good for them, or wider society or the world at large. Who will deny that hordes are clamouring to learn English out of fear of being priced out of the future global job market; or fear of being culturally handicapped? All the while (and I have an eye here on the Netherlands too) they remain constantly one (or two, or three or ten) steps behind native English speakers.

I see only one long-shot remedy and it is to introduce Esperanto in primary schools, There is now a mountain of evidence that it has multiple benefits; in itself and for future language acquisition. I recently read the report 'Esperanto as a Starter Language (Esperanto UK) which details the Springboard to Languages project (S2L) which has been going on since 2006. It has gathered evidence to demonstrate the propaedeutic effect of Esperanto. That alone is a reason for adopting it in primary schooling, rather then wading through irregular languages from scratch during the teenage years.
After having learned Esperanto as the first 'foreign language' it seems to me natural that it would then play a significant role as an auxiliary language, rather then sitting on the fringes in 'Esperantujo' as it does now.

This may inspire no hope in some long-term Esperantists who have perhaps long experience of Esperanto as a subculture language and a jaded view of it ever being a true IAL. It is, however, one of the only realistic measures for dislodging the imbalance of English dominance and moving Esperanto forward to what it is was designed to do, rather than it being a subculture.