Learning Esperanto

In a comment to my previous post, Brian Barker has suggested the site:

http://en.lernu.net

Exploring this site, I found that learning Esperanto is cool. And the course designed by Hokan Lundberg and Bertilo Wennergren is straight-forward and user-friendly (without any false links and unwanted bells and whistles).

I started by learning Esperanto numerals. It's pretty easy to learn and remember.

Basic numbers
0 - nul
1 - unu
2 - du
3 - tri
4 - kvar
5 - kvin
6 - ses
7 - sep
8 - ok
9 - naŭ
10 - dek
100 - cent
1000 - mil

11 - dek unu
12 - dek du
20 - dudek
25 - dudek kvin
237 - ducent tridek sep
1983 - mil naŭcent okdek tri
2002 - du mil du

And I took up a 'Level 1' exercise and scored centum!

Interested? Try http://en.lernu.net/lernado/gramatiko/konciza/kalkulvortoj.php

Good luck!

Esperanto

For aspirants of a unified world, Esperanto might be one of the answers.

Esperanto was devised in the 1880s by Dr. Ludwig Lazar Zamenhof (1859-1917) who was a Jew, born in Poland. Disheartened by the strong anti-Semitic feelings of the time, Zamenhof formulated Esperanto as a neutral international second language. He thought this would pave way for the liberation of Jews from the hands of racism.

Commenting on the formation of a separate Jewish state out of erstwhile Palestine, he said,

"Jews will be living there as if on a volcano… conflicts and persecutions there will not stop until the Jews are expelled from there once again".

In his book Dr Esperanto, Zamenhof defines a simple grammar and a vocabulary of 900 words. He derived these words from Romanesque, Germanic and Slavic languages.

To create new words, you an add appropriate suffixes and prefixes.

Optimists say Esperanto will become the new international language sometime in the future. We'll have to wait and see.

And Esperanto means 'Hopeful'.