Category Archives: Esperanto

Esperanto is relatively easy to learn, but it is not easy to learn. Relatively easy, because it is easier than any natural language, as it has fewer exceptions and streamlined grammar. Today, a year into my study, I’ve accomplished far more than I did in four years of high-school Spanish. Not easy to learn, because, like a natural language, Esperanto has tens of thousands of words to learn. Esperanto lessons on Duolingo proved even more addictive than I anticipated. I thought I might do it for the month or two […]

Tl;dr: Don’t pay for a Duolingo subscription. Much of the free technology that we interact with strives to build behavioral addiction primarily to show us advertising. The software developers of Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok all concentrate on increasing utilization of their respective apps, often using cognitive science against us (check out this review of Irresistible: The rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked for more). So it is nice to use an app whose developers are primarily trying to help us achieve our educational goals (though, […]