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Interview with an Esperanto speaker
Here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaES5V3ZVYw you can watch an interview of an Esperanto speaker from Adelaide done at the summerschool in Sydney in January 2010.
A story in Esperanto
If you would like to listen to a children's story in Esperanto, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5Z9kmKrExg
or watch it here. If you watch it on Youtube you can read in the video description the whole text in Esperanto.
or watch it here. If you watch it on Youtube you can read in the video description the whole text in Esperanto.
A book about languages
"Foreign languages, what they don't often tell you" is a book for children published in Sydney in 2009. To find out more about it go to http://members.iinet.net.au/~nicolee/bookad.html
A comment by a Chinese lady
Chinese magazine in Esperanto
Here is what a Chinese worker in a factory of electric appliances in Nanking has to say. Her words have been translated from Esperanto into English, so that you can understand them:
"I have always wanted to have contacts in the outside world. So I went to an English course. After an exhausting work day, there is not much energy left to strain one's mind and overload one's memory with so many unexplainable things (why, in English, can't you deduce 'first' from 'one' as you deduce 'tenth' from 'ten' and as we do in Chinese? Why can't you deduce 'my', 'mine', 'me' from 'I' as we do in Chinese?). So I realised that I simply could not assimilate all these complications. Just imagine, in English, if you know how to say tooth', this does not help you to say *dentist*, you have to memorise yet another word. And if you want to say 'mare', 'stallion' or 'colt', remembering 'horse' is of no avail. In Esperanto, as in Chinese, those words are derived from the basic word according to a consistent pattern.
I'm very glad that when a course of Esperanto was organised in our factory, I decided to follow it. Here I felt comfortable, and I enjoyed the lessons very much. Esperanto is like Chinese, a language entirely consisting of invariable elements that combine without limitation. People say that English is the international language. But what's the use of an international language that cannot be acquired by working people? I have now many contacts all over the world. For what I wanted, I didn't need English. Too bad that I was so late in discovering it."
"I have always wanted to have contacts in the outside world. So I went to an English course. After an exhausting work day, there is not much energy left to strain one's mind and overload one's memory with so many unexplainable things (why, in English, can't you deduce 'first' from 'one' as you deduce 'tenth' from 'ten' and as we do in Chinese? Why can't you deduce 'my', 'mine', 'me' from 'I' as we do in Chinese?). So I realised that I simply could not assimilate all these complications. Just imagine, in English, if you know how to say tooth', this does not help you to say *dentist*, you have to memorise yet another word. And if you want to say 'mare', 'stallion' or 'colt', remembering 'horse' is of no avail. In Esperanto, as in Chinese, those words are derived from the basic word according to a consistent pattern.
I'm very glad that when a course of Esperanto was organised in our factory, I decided to follow it. Here I felt comfortable, and I enjoyed the lessons very much. Esperanto is like Chinese, a language entirely consisting of invariable elements that combine without limitation. People say that English is the international language. But what's the use of an international language that cannot be acquired by working people? I have now many contacts all over the world. For what I wanted, I didn't need English. Too bad that I was so late in discovering it."
Interesting articles
On this website http://claudepiron.free.fr/articles.htm you'll find lots of very interesting articles about Esperanto. Scroll down to find the articles in English. I would like to recommend especially:
- So many pleasant memories (about using Esperanto in Kazakhstan)
- Esperanto: European or Asiatic language?
- 2052: after the language revolution
