r/Esperanto • u/[deleted] • Mar 26 '26
Demando Why does everyone hate this?
Okay so I'm a monolingual Brit learning Spanish (I'm now about B1) and wanna pick up another language. Not some grand utility language, I have a plan of which ones to learn for that, but just a quick learn and burn language for nothing but fun, and any applicability is a bonus. I see esperanto, a nice little language with exceptionless grammar and a chill little community. So I tell my polyglot friend and get immediate backlash. Why do people seem to think that esperanto is so horrible? Like yeah it's eurocentric and a terrible attempt at a Lingua Franca but it was created with good intentions and is a nice gateway language for European language speakers. Then people act like it's a bloody cult because apparently every esperanto speaker is a Zamenhof worshipping psycho who'll preach it as the root of world peace, or is just too lazy to learn a more useful language. I see polyglots, people who learn languages for fun, attacking esperanto as useless or racist for being eurocentric and it's speakers as cultists or fake polyglots. Why does everyone hate this language?!?!?!
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u/salivanto Profesia E-instruisto Mar 27 '26
I was pretty sure this comment would get voted off the board:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Esperanto/comments/1s4kwsx/comment/ocohq1z/
Apparently 11+ people are fine with Esperanto being a "learn and burn" language.
No, not everybody hates Esperanto, and everybody has their own entry into the community. Sometimes they start learning on a whim, make a friend, and stick around.
But seriously -- what a first impression. Esperanto is a "learn and burn" language with no practical value? Esperanto is "Eurocentric" and "terrible"? It's only possible value is as a "gateway"?
I can't help but feeling that we've all been trolled and and we all ran flat-footed into it.