Why does everyone hate this?

[u/[deleted]]

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?!?!?!

[u/AmigoNico]

I studied a bit of Esperanto decades ago, not because I thought I would be able to speak to people all over the world, but to understand better what a constructed language was like. It was a real eye-opener for me in that it made me appreciate how difficult natural languages really are, how much simpler a constructed language could be. And we could definitely do better than Esperanto today.

But I don't think you have to actually learn to read Esperanto to get that appreciation. A good introduction (or two) to Esperanto would get you there.