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Why learning Esperanto is (mostly) useless

Zac Bennett
6 min readFeb 15, 2021

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Don’t read this article if you are someone who loves Esperanto and enjoys using it on a regular basis.

But if you love learning languages and are considering learning Esperanto, read on. This is the article I wish I had read before learning Esperanto.

In order to really understand why this language is mostly useless, let’s learn more about it.

For the uninitiated, Esperanto is an artificial language created in 1873 by L.L. Zamenhof. He created it to serve as a bridge between languages, but never to replace them. It’s meant to be used as an auxiliary language and connect people across the world.

Photo by Juliana Kozoski on Unsplash

It was created to be simple and easy to learn. Esperanto has no irregularities in its grammar or pronunciation. In fact, learning the entire grammar requires just 16 rules.

In the pre-internet days, Esperanto lived in local meetups, pen-pals, magazines, and the yearly Esperanto Congress. Esperanto was taught through books, or through a weekly lesson sent by mail.

With the creation of the internet, it’s never been easier to learn and experience Esperanto. There are Facebook Groups, YouTube channels and Reddit groups all dedicated to learning and discussing Esperanto. One of the most popular methods is the Duolingo course which was launched in 2016.

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Zac Bennett
Zac Bennett

Written by Zac Bennett

I’m a Software Engineer with too many hobbies. I write about whatever I think is interesting.

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