Mi malame finis la Esperantan kurson.

[sistawendy]

I have just hate-finished the Esperanto course on Duolingo.

Why hate? Because the last of the four sections got really repetitive. And to make matters worse, skipping levels meant getting tested on vocabulary that I hadn't practiced in a while and forgot in a few cases because – wait for it – Duolingo was too busy drilling me on the same things over and over.

Why finish if I hated it? Jeez, have you met me or read this journal?

So do I still recommend Duolingo? Not for obscure languages like Esperanto or Welsh. The Spanish course seems to be much better done in terms of both content, presentation, and audio quality, and I speculate that the more popular languages are also well done. I suspect that the Esperanto course was a volunteer effort. I hope that the deficiencies in the course are due mostly to Duolingo's algorithms, not their efforts.

What do I think of Esperanto as a language? I grudgingly admit that it's easier than Spanish, and it's probably easier than English for those learning it as a second language. Here, however, are my beefs with it:

1. As in Spanish, the prepositions don't line up nicely with those in English. This was probably inevitable, so no disrespect to Dr. Zamenhof on this issue.
2. It's a mouthful, thanks in part to the reluctance to multiply roots, especially pairs of antonyms, and its abundance of "affixes" to make up for that. Road to hell, good intentions.
3. Because Esperanto borrows so heavily from both French and German, Esperanto words nearly always have a cognate in English, but that doesn't necessarily help you remember them. It does, however, make you feel dumb when you forget them.
4. Esperanto has been infected with two of the romancisms that I like least: reflexive verbs that could be intransitive, and verbs that insist on a phrase with a particular preposition instead of transitivity. At least they're not as irritatingly common in Esperanto as in Spanish.
5. The pronouns all end in "i", which can make distinguishing them when spoken difficult.

What do I think of Esperanto as an idea? Le sigh. I want to believe in it, but I don't. Peace and understanding through a shared language made way more sense in 19th-century Bialystok, Poland than they do in America today. Can Esperanto be a window on the world, or even a ticket to it? Sure, but people have to want those things, and I don't know how to make that happen. And there's a bootstrapping problem: an awful lot of what gets written in Esperanto is about... Esperanto.

But did I have fun learning it? Shyeah!