Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

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!

Friday night: I had a first date off a dating site, this time with another trans woman, M. It was all right, but I wasn't feeling the spark. Like so many trans women, M is ex-military*. I've noticed that people who do well in the military, including the children of service members, seem to share a distinctive personality type: outgoing even by my standards, with a love of personal badassery that at times I find a little off-putting. Yeah, I'll keep in touch because I said I would, but I dunno.

Immediately after that was ramen with Shiny H & G. I shouldn't be allowed around people when I'm caffeinated** because I'm even less filtered than usual. In any event, nice ramen followed by the Merc. It's a good thing I'm not a coulrophobe: I've seen DJ Hana Solo dressed as a clown, and it's a little scary even to me. G told me she's the boob fairy: everyone she dates goes up a cup size. Oddly enough, that's not sufficient incentive for me, at least not anymore.

I left at the stroke of midnight because, as I told G, I'm on call, old, and cheap.

I went to an Esperanto meetup on top of Queen Anne late yesterday morning. I learned that walking up that hill from the east is just as arduous as doing it from the south, i.e. the Seattle Center. And since I was low on sleep, I soon became angry with myself for my difficulty in remembering Esperanto words that I had no trouble pulling out of my head after a nap.

I slept about nine hours last night, and dreamt all the aggro dreams. I figure I needed it.

Tonight: a date at the 'Rose with a trans woman who's straight up told me she has a crush on me. We have a lot of acquaintances in common, and we know each other a little bit. This one has some potential, I think.



*M is not the first trans woman to point out to me that a lot of young trans girls who haven't figured themselves out yet – "eggs" as they're often called – are desperate to prove to themselves what manly men they are. And how better to do that than join the military?
**I had originally scheduled my date with M at Espresso Vivace on Broadway, not realizing that they're not open as late as they were in the before times. When asked, one of the staff said, "Nobody wants to work late." To which I mentally appended, '...for what Vivace is paying.' M & I hit the Wildrose, natch. Fun fact: I've been on tons of first dates at Vivace, including the amazing one with Funny Lady.