Out of the blue, this text from a friend:
"Esperanto? Really?"
The fun, social features of your favorite apps can become very uncomfortable, very quickly. Coworkers using a fitness tracker app to cheer each other toward a health goal? Nice. Your boss seeing exactly how many of your daily workouts took place during weekday afternoons? Hm.
Back when Duolingo was the new and shiny way to learn languages, my monoglot friends and I had lofty ambitions of finally achieving some kind of proficiency in whatever it was we had studied in high school. This was always either French or Spanish or German — important languages with rich literatures and plenty of practical applications. Languages that might "come in handy."
For this kind of language learner, the whole endeavor is a bit like trying to get six-pack abs. You must work at it almost daily, perhaps for years, motivated by the belief that one day, on a nice vacation, you'll find yourself either shirtless on a beach or peckish in a Parisian cafe, and thanks to your tireless preparation, you'll face that moment with a bit less embarrassment. This is considered a respectable goal offering a reasonable return on investment.
Still, the fantasy is not quite enough to sustain you through the hard moments when you just don't feel like putting in the effort, so you need some kind of tangible, near-term reward — like a virtual high five from a friend, congratulating you on maintaining a perfect 30 day streak. And so you mustn't Duolingo in private; you must connect to your network of fellow aspirants. And you share your progress, and you thumbs up theirs, and they thumbs up yours, and we all get closer to becoming the fit global citizens we long to be.
Duo helped me resuscitate a few phrases from high school French in time for a vacation to Paris, but there was never any doubt that I was an American tourist. I also picked up some basic Spanish, completing the entire Duo curriculum in an attempt to keep up with my niece in a bilingual kindergarten. When Japanese was added to the app, I dabbled in that for a few months leading up to a work trip; this helped me to successfully pick out the word "strawberry" on a package of pink Kit Kats in Tokyo.
And then, years after I had forgotten who among my friends could still see my progress in the app, Duolingo added Esperanto. Esperanto is the most successful of the world's invented languages, but still, you know, a made up language. I can't maintain the fantasy that it might "come in handy," and so, sure, maybe the effort to learn it calls for some loving mockery from friends who have, to my surprise and horror, been notified on their phones of my steady progress toward proficiency in the language.
As surely as I will never achieve six-pack abs, I will never find myself in a foreign airport deciphering an Esperanto candy wrapper with childlike proficiency. But I do try to workout from time to time, and I think Esperanto is kind of neat.
I'll borrow an example Roman Mars mentions on an episode of the 99% Invisible podcast about designed languages. Because Esperanto is designed to follow strict, predictable rules for grammar and word construction, any root can become a noun by adding an -o ending, an adjective by adding an -a, a present tense verb by adding -as, and so on. So while in English you're stuck saying "The sky is blue," it's easy and common in Esperanto, in all its rationality, to get quite playful and poetic, to turn the adjective into a verb, and transform "la ĉielo estas blua" into "la ĉielo bluas" — "the sky is bluing."
And isn't that lovely?
—ML
