We're gonna talk about something that I get questioned about all the time

Now before we get started, I know I'm gonna get a ton of hate for making this video

So if you think I'm being ridiculous for learning Esperanto

Feel free to leave me some hate down in the comment section below. You will not change my mind

Esperanto is a constructed language that was developed in the 1800s

And this video is gonna be three reasons why I'm learning Esperanto and why I think you should too. My first reason for learning Esperanto

Is that it will help you learn future languages. I'm gonna start this one off with a blanket statement

Esperanto is so much easier

Than any other language except for maybe Toki Pona The grammar rules in Esperanto are just very easy to follow and there are no

irregularities

Researchers have been studying this for many years and the results are clear one study found that if you study

Esperanto for only 20 hours

(Which if you're a nerd like me you can do that in a week.) If you learn Esperanto for only 20 hours

You'll learn as much language as if you were learning Spanish French Italian or German for 100 hours

Meaning you would be learning five times as much Esperanto per hour

Than if you were learning these other languages. Another study showed that among high school

students who wanted to learn French over a period of four years

Some students who learned Esperanto for one year and then learned French for the next three years learned French to a higher level

Than those who had been learning French for the whole four years

There's an easy comparison here between learning languages and learning music. If you've never learned a language before and you want to learn Mandarin Chinese

That's kind of like picking up a tuba for the first time.

There's a reason elementary schools start students off with learning the recorder before they start to learn how to play the tuba

It's because it's easier and it teaches you the basic principles for learning how to play music. In this example

Esperanto is like the recorder. Learning Esperanto is a low stakes low stress

Fun easy way of learning all the skills that you need to develop in order to learn how to learn languages

That's why a lot of polyglots recommend learning Esperanto for a short period of time to help you with your other languages

Even if you have no interest in continuing to master Esperanto. Of course, if you're a nerd like me

Then you're gonna have so much fun learning Esperanto that you won't want to stop

Just like how if you're a music nerd like me

You're gonna want to keep playing the recorder even after you graduate from third grade, which brings me really nicely into my next point

I'm learning Esperanto

Because it's fun. Dang it

If you've never learned Esperanto

You have no idea how motivating it is to study a language for a week or less and already be able to hold basic

Conversations with people. I started learning Esperanto the day it came out on duolingo and within that week

I was already finding people online to chat with in Esperanto and hold full-fledged conversations

Even if my Esperanto wasn't really great. That same week, Chuck Smith released videos on his YouTube channel of people who had been learning Esperanto

For 3 days and they were able to hold entire

conversations in

Esperanto interview style on his YouTube channel, if you're a language nerd like me, this is fun

It doesn't matter if you're never gonna take a vacation to Esperanto-land

It doesn't matter if you can't get an esperanto minor at college.

You learn it because it's enjoyable. When I was in high school

I used to spend hours a day playing

Halo and nobody thought that was weird, so no

I'm not gonna apologize to you for doing something I find enjoyable in my free time

If you don't think learning Esperanto is fun. Don't do it

But then you're gonna miss out on the opportunity to see what it's like to learn a language at blazingly fast

speeds. Now, as much as I find studying Esperanto to be fun

The really enjoyable thing about Esperanto is my third reason for learning the language and that is the Esperanto community

Whenever I tell people I'm learning Esperanto

One of the first objections I get from them is "But you'll never meet somebody who speaks it". This is false

I've met a ton of people who speak Esperanto through a variety of means the year is 2018 and we have this big

Beautiful place for meeting other people called the internet. There are dozens of apps and websites out there

Dedicated to helping you find other people that you can message and chat with online

I'm twitter friends with a bunch of other people that speak esperanto on twitter. There's also a thriving esperanto community here on youtube

I personally have a separate channel separate from this one where I speak only

Esperanto and people are on there commenting all the time

I've made a lot of Esperanto speaking friends just through them commenting on my YouTube channel

If you're not into online penpals, then physical Esperanto meetings are a real thing

There's worldwide congresses local meetups most big cities have Esperanto societies where local

Esperantists meet up once a week or once a month

There's a yearly meetup in North Carolina where people come from around the world to learn

Esperanto together when I was in Montreal this summer for a length fest. I ran into a ton of other Esperanto speakers there

There's also a free service called the passport the servo which is essentially couchsurfing for Esperanto speakers

I've used this service twice once in Canada and once in Ireland to get a free place to stay and

Practice my Esperanto with somebody all these reasons add up to why we say Esperanto has its own culture

There's also tons of music in Esperanto literature some originally written in Esperanto and others

Translated into Esperanto like La Hobito by JRR tolkien

There's also Esperanto TV shows in Esperanto movies one of which stars William Shatner before he was in Star Trek

Esperanto culture is vibrant and active and the Esperanto community has been growing larger and larger every day

Especially over the last few years since the development of Esperanto duolingo

It's an exciting time to be an Esperanto speaker

And all I can say is if you haven't considered

Trying it before learning Esperanto can give you a lot of reward for a lot less effort than your other languages

So thanks for watching the video and we'll see you guys next time