Esperanto: Learning and Using the International Language

by David Richardson

This introductory textbook begins with an extensive English-language introduction, covering the need for an international language, an overview of Esperanto's history, and the international Esperanto community. A series of brief lessons with exercises follows, concentrating on practical communication and vocabulary. The highlight of the book is a graded reader, which includes history, letters, stories, and poetry (both translated from English and drawn from original Esperanto literature) that gradually introduce more advanced usage and additional vocabulary. The book concludes with an abridged Esperanto-to-English dictionary.

Genres: Language, Linguistics, Nonfiction

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Alien · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably one of the best resources for learning Esperanto. I can not express how helpful and easy to read and comprehend it is. The history/culture/current events section is terribly outdated in older versions but the lessons and reading sections are amazing. I found the reading sections in the back not only interesting but informative about Esperanto culture and full of even more tidbits and info on the use of the language itself.

A new edition has just (within the last week or so) been published, and is now available as print on demand or e-book on Amazon, or as a free PDF download at Esperanto-USA. In the new edition the out of date content has been removed and small improvements made to the lessons and reading (mostly fixing typos and other such errors)

If you want to learn Esperanto, this is one of the best books you can get, and I highly recommend it.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lee Miller mentioned that this book has great annotations. After realizing that already I own it, I decided to read through the graded reader portion of the book. The annotations are pretty good for individual words that you might be expected to figure out on your own normally, like "eltiri" is "to take out." I enjoyed the reading the letters between two young Esperantists. The travelogue was okay--I loved the part where he spoke more easily with the person who had been studying Esperanto for one year than the person who had studied English for much longer. Complete Esperanto: Learn to read, write, speak and understand Esperanto is more current, but if you're strapped for cash, this one is freely available from the E-USA online store.

Lee Miller menciis ke ĉi tiu libro havas bonajn prinotaĵojn. Post kiam mi eksciis, ke mi jam havas ĝin, mi decidis tralegi la parton de la libro kiu estis graditan lernlibron. La prinotaĵoj ja estas bonaj, por individuaj vortoj, kiujn oni devas normale mem-eltrovi, kiel "eltiri" signifas "tiri el io." Mi ĝuis legi la leterojn inter la du junaj Esperantistoj. La vojaĝverko estis kaj ete teda kaj interesa--mi ŝatis la parton, kiam li parolis pli facile kun la persono kiu studis Esperanton unu jaron kompare al la persono kiu studis la anglan pli longe. Complete Esperanto: Learn to read, write, speak and understand Esperanto estas pli moderna, sed se vi ne povas elspezi monon, ĉi tiu estas senpage elŝutebla de la E-USA retbutiko.

[Dave Maddock · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't realize it fully at the time, but the reader in the second half of this book is top-notch. Of course, Zamenhof's few original poems are there, but you also get readings from his letters about creating the language, and a short biographical piece. There are running serials of correspondence and travel logs which is decent reading. Among the last of the selections are William Auld's poem Ebrio and excerpts from Baghy's Sur Sanga Tero and Tibor Sekelj's book about his travels in the Amazon--all of which were originally composed in Esperanto.

My two textbook recommendations for new learners would be this book and the now out-of-print 3rd edition of Teach Yourself Esperanto. From these you can go straight into real Esperanto literature.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I still think the best book on Esperanto instruction I've read so far was the Teach Yourself Esperanto, 3rd Edition. I thought the instruction in this book was fine, and there were a few lessons that helped clarify a few grammar rules. The biggest benefit of this book, in my opinion, was the second half of the book, which was an Esperanto reader. It was helpful to see the language used in passages that were not just short, basic sentences used for instructional examples.

[Shawn Mcdowell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Esperanto

This ebook is a very good staffer book on learning this language. Just take your time with it and you will be speaking Esperanto in short time.

[Haritha · Rating 4 out of 5]

An easy and accessible introduction to the basics of Esperanto. It is self-guided and self-paced, but it can also be used in a group for discussions.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone more than a little bit fond of foreign languages [1], it should come as little surprise that my attention should eventually be turned to Esperanto. Honestly, I'm not sure why this didn't happen a long time ago. Esperanto is, after all, a quirky international language that does not have any sort of nationalistic baggage and that has the impossibly ambitious goal of reversing the curse of Babel on humanity through the use of a "neutral" language that ran afoul of both Communists and anti-Communists as well as Nazis over the course of the 20th century. Despite being the native language of only a few children born of Esperanto-speaking couples with no other language in common, the language is spoken by somewhere between 1 and 10 million people (making it among the most commonly spoken languages in the world) and has some quirky appeal. So yes, it was only a matter of time before a language this odd and with such colossal ambitions and such a strange history should find its way into my own reading list, and that moment has come.

How does this book stack up? At more than 300 pages, this book manages to combine several different types of books in one. The first 60-odd pages of this book with four chapters make up the pitch of the author to learn Esperanto, talking about the trouble with language, the need to solve the language problem, the search (in vain) for a common language, and the potential of Esperanto today and tomorrow. The second part of the book, which takes up about 100 pages or so, consists of ten lessons in basic grammar of Esperanto, and by basic I mean that someone who is reasonably skilled at recognizing patterns can gain at least some familiarity in speaking and writing Esperanto at a basic level without much trouble at all, and can apparently gain a great deal of skill within the course of only a few months. As far as a language is concerned, Esperanto is very straightforward for being among the oddest languages of the Indo-European language family. If one knows Spanish or Italian, for example, a lot of Esperanto will look and sound very familiar. The third part of the book, which takes up a bit more than 100 pages, consists of an Esperanto reader with 4 reading exercises for the student of the language. The book then closes with another section that includes a key to the dialogues and exercises within the book as well as a select bibliography and a small Esperanto-English vocabulary which largely repeats the various Vortolistoj (word lists) within the book.

This book is one that could have been an immense chore to read given its difficult linguistic material, but it ended up being a greatly humorous book to read. How did it manage to accomplish this? Well, the dialogues are quite funny, as they form a series of encounters where an American gentleman manages to find a cab driver who speaks Esperanto along with many other random people. This seems at least a little bit contrived, but the very silliness of the framing of Esperanto being a language widely spoken so that one could have random encounters with other speakers all over the world is one that adds a sense of lightheartedness to the book in general that only makes it more enjoyable to read. The fact that the language is already at least somewhat intelligible for those who know other Romance languages and can learn a few rules allows for a learning curve that is less steep than many foreign languages would be. This book is sufficiently odd and quirky to be a good introduction for an odd and quirky language like Esperanto is, and even if it never becomes a language used for UN documents to ease the burden of translation, it represents a language that offers at least a chance at intercultural communication as well as some pretty impressive literature, and that is enough to make it an enjoyable and worthwhile read that I will likely return to as a reference.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

[Zach May · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good enough tutorial, plus a handful of decent essays about the history of the language.