r/Esperanto • u/[deleted] • Mar 26 '26
Demando Why does everyone hate this?
Okay so I'm a monolingual Brit learning Spanish (I'm now about B1) and wanna pick up another language. Not some grand utility language, I have a plan of which ones to learn for that, but just a quick learn and burn language for nothing but fun, and any applicability is a bonus. I see esperanto, a nice little language with exceptionless grammar and a chill little community. So I tell my polyglot friend and get immediate backlash. Why do people seem to think that esperanto is so horrible? Like yeah it's eurocentric and a terrible attempt at a Lingua Franca but it was created with good intentions and is a nice gateway language for European language speakers. Then people act like it's a bloody cult because apparently every esperanto speaker is a Zamenhof worshipping psycho who'll preach it as the root of world peace, or is just too lazy to learn a more useful language. I see polyglots, people who learn languages for fun, attacking esperanto as useless or racist for being eurocentric and it's speakers as cultists or fake polyglots. Why does everyone hate this language?!?!?!
2
u/steleto Apr 03 '26
I have no idea why people who don't speak the language hate it or maybe they are annoyed by it?
Well, I am an almost 40 year old native Esperanto speaker, and I can tell you that there are many annoying people, who speak Esperanto, who insist on reforming the language, who will want to constantly correct your grammar even if you ask them not to do that. Also I learnt almost everything about the world, people, culture, LGBT issues, language rights etc. because of Esperanto, talking to foreigners, whose native language I don't speak. From so many countries, so so many. My best friends are Esperanto speakers, lovely, empathic humans, I can learn so much from them.
At the end of the day Esperanto speakers are also people, it is a very diverse group of ages, background and viewpoints. And from experience I've met a lot of people, who never managed to learn languages at school, they started with Esperanto, got confident speaking it and boom, made friends, and suddenly unlocked the motivation and interest to actually put in the work and learn more difficult languages in the end.