Esperanto Secrets

by Collin Carbno

In the context of this book, Esperanto secrets are the principles that Zamenhof used to design Esperanto as an easy to learn language. In particular, the book explores how to leverage those principles to speed up one's learning of Esperanto. I start with the claim that one can learn 80% of the basics of the Esperanto in just 15 minutes! I know that when I started this sounded absolutely impossible. Yet, I've found that it is true, 80% of what one needs to navigate one's way around in Esperanto can be learned in just about 15 minutes. Of course, I don't want to learn the impression that after 15 minutes you would find communicating in Esperanto an easy task, the missing 20% would be a huge source of frustration and confusion. The rest of the focus of the book is about mastering that last 20%.

In the context of this book mastering the Esperanto language consists of mastering: 1) pronunciation 2) word morphology 3) special small words and 4) vocabulary. The focus of the book's teaching plan is a quick review of pronunciation and Esperanto alphabet, followed by a study of about 138 Esperanto word morphology rules that apply to virtual all words except a few small common words that are mostly prepositions and conjunctions. At last count I had 115 small common words in the book, and these would cover at least 95% of all small words in Esperanto language. The morphology word rules and small words are put into a learning list of 253 items. If one spends 10 minutes a day, it is my claim that most people can learn 10 items per day, so that roughly in one-month one will have mastered the heart of Esperanto. The main one component missing is of course vocabulary. It is position of this book that vocabulary is most easily learned as one uses the language! In particular, the aim of this book is to deliver the needed fundamental Esperanto knowledge so that with the aid of an English-Esperanto bi-directional-dictionary an English speaker should be able to communicate in Esperanto. Picking up the vocabulary should then be just a matter of reading, writing and speaking the language enough to become familiar with a core vocabulary. Most languages have a working vocabulary of about 20,000 words. Esperanto because of its special construction uses only about 2000 root words, and this 10 to one advantage over most languages is another reason that Esperanto is so much fun to learn and use.

123 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 19, 2014