i have just started learning esperanto and i have found it difficult as the amount of hard copy materials in my local library are low, also whenever i learn esperanto in school at break i just get hit with sarcasm and jokes about the usefulness of esperanto, how useful is esperanto?  Is it worth learning?

U shud read pages 2 &4, in intro, language learning.

This helped change a few peoples minds about how useful the language is, when i told them about it!

I've been learning Esperanto for just three weeks and I already have a better grasp of it than I have of Japanese after months or German after years of study. It's definitely worth learning for several reasons, the main one being that it boosts your ability to learn any foreign language.

The internet seems to be the best resource for learning the language, so I'd stick with that if you have good access.

Hi

I started learning Esperanto when I was a freshman in high school and I got teased endlessly for it.  People made all kinds of cracks when they saw the Esperanto dictionary sticking out of my backpack, or they would make jokes about my penpals ("international boyfriends"-though interestingly enough, about 7 years later, one of them became just that).  And yeah, you feel like the least cool person in the whole class.   You just have to deal with it and try to ignore it. 

Now, I describe the decision to study Esperanto as the best decision I ever made.  As mentioned before, that's how I met my boyfriend - so it gets me a couple trips to Italy each year.  I've also travelled to England and Bosnia for Esperanto-related reasons.  And you can travel pretty much anywhere and stay in Esperanto speakers' houses for free.  Anyway I've met a lot of really cool people.  When I was finally able to start attending Esperanto events on a regular basis, a few years after I learned to speak, it was like I had a huge community of great friends that I just hadn't met before.  It was great to be with a group of people who also thought languages were really cool, who were happy to discuss things like grammar of different languages, or to compare stories of Esperanto events they'd been to, or to figure out what common Esperanto friends we might have.  And honestly, this past year I went, as usual, to an annual Esperanto weekend in Vermont (every Columbus Day weekend - though this year it will be in New York state).  I pulled out my brand new book from my bag, "First steps in Old English" and said "Look what I got!"  And all of the other young people were like "woooooowwwwwww" and we spent the entire weekend learning how to say random stuff in Old English.  I couldn't really think of many other situations where the "cool kid thing to do" would be learn Old English words.

- Erin