I’d like to learn another language… Not for any reason other than it’d be fun to do. I’ve considered Esperanto but my concern is, how often will I run into a fellow Esperantist and further to that, how would I know? Is it worth my while or should I have a crack at Japanese?
If you want to increase your chance of randomly meeting someone who speaks something other than English you should learn Mandarin Chinese…
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Moved thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
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If you wish to converse with others almost any language would suit you better…even Klingon.
Fellow Doper Sunspace speaks Esperanto, and I believe belongs to an Esperanto organization somewhere up in Kanuckistan. I’m sure he’d have some good advice for you.
I heartily endorse attempting Japanese. 
As dolphinboy alluded upthread, you’d probably be better off learning one of the Chinese languages.
Hej saluton! There are several Esperanto-speakers on this board, including myself. 
I must disagree with Czarcasm; thanks to the all-connective powers of the Internet, it is now much easier to interact with Esperanto-speakers, and even meet them in person.
However, I didn’t start learning Esperanto primarily to meet people; I started learning it because I was sick of being monolingual and wanted an easy-to-learn* language to start with. I found Esperanto-speakers in Toronto, and later went overseas and spoke it exclusively at a conference.
If you want to learn a language to converse with people, first figure out the people you want to converse with, then pick that language.
Being English-Canadian, I want to learn French, so I can speak to the 20% of Canadians who speak French. So, having greased my brain with learning Esperanto, I’ve applied for a five-week French-immersion program at Université Laval in Québec City. If I get in, I should have an easier time, because I’m already out of the monolingual mould.
A few years ago, I was taking total-immersion Japanese. The course was a stunning demonstration of the power of immersion: even for total beginners like myself, it was taught only in Japanese. (They started out with plenty of body language.) After eight weeks, I was actually asking questions and conversing in Japanese. But I want to take Japanese for artistic reasons.
So my point is, do you have some other goal that would require learning a language to further it? Then learn that language. There are people who learn languages simply because they’re interesting, and perhaps you’re one of them. But learning a language is enormous hard work, and few people can stick to it without the thought of another goal to push them on.
[sub]*Well, easier to learn than French, anyways… no language is actually easy to learn.
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A friend of my parents’ said that he often got professional news (he was a physician) in Esperanto before he got it in other languages.
Dear Czarcasm (in Esperanto: Kara Sarkasmo),
see http://www.remush.be/rebuttal/index.html#184
… and other similar replies to similar opinions
Remuŝ
I actually took a crack at Esperanto back in the mid 1980’s, before I was on the Internet. I still have a couple “learn Esperanto” books on my shelf and at the time did not have much trouble finding people to practice the language with. In those days we had pen pals with actual writing of hardcopy letters, pen or pencil on paper, utilizing postage.
As it happens, I moved on to other things but I have at least as much Esperanto as Spanish or Irish Gaelic, and frankly, the Esperanto has been more useful than the Gaelic.
With the Internet it is FAR easier to locate resources and/or people to converse with than it used to be.
Go ahead, take a stab at it. Learning about ANY language is helpful for increasing your language skills in all your languages (I learned a vast amount about my native tongue of English by studying French for 5 years).
In Esperanto my name(Czarcasm), which is a play on two words(czar and sarcasm), becomes “Sarkasmo”. Where is the wit and wordplay in “Sarkasmo”?
estimates of the number of Esperanto speakers run from the tens of thousands to 2,000,000. I read that the 2,00,000 figure is generally disputed with the maximum number of speakers estimated by some to be half that, by others to be significantly less.
Apparently a relatively common ‘joke’ is that when you get two Esperanto speakers together, they talk about Esperanto.
Why would you expect a pun to travel directly across languages? Wordplay tends to be very language-specific, because words are language specific.
Besides, “Czar” or “Tsar” is “caro” in Esperanto. (“C” is pronounced as “ts” in English.) So some sense of the pun in your username could be had by rendering it as “Carkasmo”.
I have a friend named “Juan”, but because I speak English I call him…Juan. Likewise, My name in Esperanto is “Czarcasm”, because that is what I call myself.
Many Esperanto-speakers translate some sense of their national-language names into Esperanto. On the other hand, many don’t, especially if their name isn’t really translatable. It’s completely optional.
I kind of want to learn Esperanto too, for absolutely no good reason (I also want to learn Latin, same lack of reason). en.lernu.net has free lessons, although I haven’t tried it yet, so I don’t know how good it is.
I’ve heard that lernu.net is pretty good.
I learned the old-fashioned way, via the email version of the Ten-Lesson Course for beginners, followed by an in-person course and a heck of a lot of practice via instant messaging. Plus visiting the club and interacting with actual speakers.
Then cam my first phone call in the new language. It was such an effort that I was bathed in sweat and had a splitting headache afterwards.
But it got easier, and in two years I was able to go to that conference overseas and speak nothing but the language.
Only in China. In the rest of the world, Spanish would be a better bet for maximizing the odds of successful random encounters.
Unless you have some special reason to want to learn Japanese, I’d recommend against going that route. I say this as someone who has studied Japanese and lived briefly in Japan. People assume I’m being modest when I say that after all this I don’t speak Japanese well, but believe me, I’m not. Japanese is one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn, the writing system is very complicated, and if you’re not planning to visit Japan then you’re unlikely to run into many people who speak Japanese.
If you have some particular interest in Japanese then sure, go for it, but if you really just want to learn a second language for fun and to talk to other people who speak it then there are a number of other languages that are likely to be easier to pick up and/or more useful.
I’ll second Derlith; if you live in the Western Hemisphere, Spanish is the logical choice to study. Elsewhere, the choice is more complicated, so Sunspace’s advice to first think about who you’d like to talk to should be your first step before you decide which language to study.
Well, Western Henisphere except for parts of Canada, Brazil, arguably Peru, and various Caribbean places. They speak French, Brazilian Portuguese, Quechua, and various languages like Dutch and French, respectively.