Tag Archives: Esperanto

June 20 marks my third anniversary of studying Esperanto. To celebrate my anniversary, I thought I’d share some resources I have found valuable. Photo by Stefan on Unsplash.

Email is a cruel master. When I first started working in an office, in the 1980s, we shared files via “sneaker net” – taking them back and forth on floppies. Very high tech. For customers and prospects, we sent and received documents overnight through FedEx, then we sent and received faxes. When we first got email, we could only email other people in our building. Then, of course, we could finally email through the Internet. Over time, my In Box became my master, often to the detriment of my true […]

In 1985 or so, I logged on to my first online community, dialing into a local BBS (Bulletin Board System) using a 300-baud modem. Eventually I got on Compuserve, USENET, Brown University mailing lists, and AOL. Leaving dial-up behind, I joined LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. I have accounts for the last five, though I rarely ever use them. I still have a friend who I first met on the Compuserve marketing SIG. Online communities are often ephemeral, though for me Twitter had the longest heyday, as I used […]

I finished Level 1 of the Duolingo Esperanto course in 50 days, after about 70 hours of study. Near the end of Level 1, I created an Esperanto-only Twitter account and could read and write basic tweets in Esperanto. All subsequent levels of the Duolingo course after Level 1 are just a repetition of what you’ve already learnt. So the emphasis is really on practice. I completed the Duolingo course on May 14, 693 days in (1.9 years), studying for 15 to 30 minutes a day. And today’s my two-year […]

Nearly half (47%) of American adults have heard of a fictional of constructed language (“conlang”) such as Klingon (39%), Valyrian (18%), Dothraki (17%), or Esperanto (9%), according to a new online survey of 1,377 adults. Six out of ten Americans (62%) have reported watching a show or movie where people used fictional languages (though they may not have known the language’s name). One out of five (20%) have read about fictional languages. However, few Americans (5%) have ever studied a constructed language. The top three conlangs studied were Klingon (2% of Americans), Esperanto […]

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, […]

Mark Rosenfelder has edited and updated my articles and essays from the Model Languages newsletter and the former Langmaker.com website, assembling them into the book Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs. Available now as a Kindle or paperback from Amazon! Here’s the very first issue I ever published. From: Jeffrey Henning <74774.157@compuserve.com> Subject: _Model Languages_, 5/1/95 MODEL LANGUAGES The newsletter discussing newly imagined words for newly imagined worlds ————————————————————————– Volume I, Issue 1 — May 1, 1995 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HOBBY OF MODEL LANGUAGES Some people build model airplanes, some craft model […]