🧉 Martin That's awesome! Give me a shout if I can help :) Here are my Esperanto projects, by the way, some of which you may find helpful (like the speech robot): esperanto.martinru...

🧉 Martin Very cool. If you decide to jump back in and have any questions, mi felicxe respondus iujn ajn demandojn viajn :)

🧉 Martin I speak some German, and I'm *slowly* learning Hebrew. Lojban never interested me much, but I'd love to learn a bit of Volapuk. I've dabbled in Toki Pona, which I'd like to put some more time into as I have friends who can speak it well. Toki Pona is considered the "sekreta lingvo inter Esperantistoj" (secret language for Esperanto speakers), since Esperanto quickly loses that attribute during Esperanto gatherings :) How about you?

🧉 Martin I was talking to others on a train in the UK, and a woman on the opposite table interrupted to ask if we were speaking Esperanto. That was surprising! Aside from that, I've only ever bumped into others during large events where the local town is flooded with 200+ speakers, so not so random. I have friends who simply don't speak English, and others who speak it badly... it's awesome to chat on a completely equal footing. RE anglicisms: when first learning, but very rarely now.

🧉 Martin It's easy to progress quickly in the language due to its regularity and how well it was designed to reinforce itself grammatically. After around 6 months I was able to have a good level of conversation. After 1 year of study and use I felt pretty close to fluent, and attended classes at CEFR C1. The course at lernu.net/eo/kurso... is a good start, as well as the Duolingo content. My friend released Teach Yourself Esperanto last year, and that's a great book!

🧉 Martin It has a really active community of speakers, especially during this COVID period. During my time learning, I also attended some in-person events (some with over 200 people) which run for a week, so I made some good friends that way. There's now pretty much a full calendar of online events from all over the world (eventaservo.org). I learned via various books, events, and through plenty of practice.

🧉 Martin I do. I spent a bit of time (2 years) working in that space. "Monero" is the Esperanto word for "coin", composed of "mono" (money) + "-er" (piece). This highlights a nice feature of Esperanto, in that "-er" can be applied anywhere it makes logical sense, e.g.: negxero (snowflake), pluvero (raindrop), panero (breadcrumb), fajrero (spark). I'm not sure all that many people in the Monero community really speak Esperanto, however. Or rather, I didn't mean many.