🧉 Martin A few years ago I decided to learn Esperanto (the constructed language). I now spend anywhere from a few hours to a few days per week speaking it with friends from around the world. AMA :) (or just shake your head disapprovingly)

🧿 Andrea Where do you find people to speak out with? How did you learn?

🧉 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.

🧿 Andrea Why did you decide to learn Esperanto and not Spanish? They seem very similar

🎲 Jamie Pretty different set of (linguistic) considerations between learning a natural and constructed language IMO. And cultural too, I imagine!

🧉 Martin Absolutely. Linguistically speaking it's far more regular. Phonologically it shares mostly the same sound inventory as a typical European language. Morphologically it's very interesting as its regular and well-designed system for derivation removes a lot of pain from learning vocabulary. In fact, I've lost count of the number of times I've heard a word for the first time and was easily able to determine its meaning.

🧿 Andrea Thanks for all the information! If you had asked me before what Esperanto was before this thread I would have probably said it was some dialect spoken somewhere in Spain :)

🧉 Martin Nedankinde (you're welcome)! It's a big interest of mine, so I'm always more than happy to talk about it :)