Open Thread: How Did You First Hear About Esperanto?

I do remember seeing flyers about Esperanto at my college campus in the early 1980s, but I had no interest in it at that time. It's possible I had heard of it when I was in high school in the late 1970s, but I have no memory of that.

But in early 2001, my then-8-year-old son, who already had an interest in languages, was trying to invent his own languages and writing systems and asked me to help him learn about constructed languages online. We poked around together and discovered Esperanto, and we each started taking an online course. He only did a few lessons, enough for his purposed, and happily went off inventing his own language [I think it was called "Langent"], littering the house with scraps of paper with a combination alphabet/syllabary that looked vaguely like a combination of Thai and Arabic. But I was struck by how easy and pretty it was (I had been forced to take language courses for graduation from high school and college and never liked them much and quickly forgot what little I learned -- but this seemed so much nicer!) -- I very quickly finished the course and started reading online, buying books, writing doggerel, etc.

I doubt it will ever be a *big* part of my life, but it definitely has been fun and I hope I can putter a bit more with it in the future. And my son has gone on to develop an intense interest in linguistics and languages. That interest began before his exposure to Esperanto, but I do think it helped contribute to his growth at the time and it still influences our own discussions on many topics.

I think I first heard about Esperanto in the year 1992 or 1993. At that time, I was a very curious university student, who was enthralled with and studying foreign languages. I think I came across Teach Yourself Esperanto in a bookstore, and snapped it up. That was an old habit of mine, buying grammar books for languages I was curious about, even if I knew that my chances of using the languages were slim.

At about the same time, I had a rather eccentric friend who knew several foreign languages well. He had heard about every obscure thing known to man, particularly languages. I asked him if he had ever heard of Esperanto. He said he learned it a little in the year 1989, and he played recordings of some of his conversations in it (he had recorded them on cassette as a learning aid). However, he had not continued to learn or use the language much after that time. He said that speakers seemed to be few and far between, and I never pursued the matter further at that point. I eventually forgot that I even had the Teach Yourself book. The Internet was not a big thing yet at that time.

In February of 2005, I was unemployed, and my previous employment had been overseas. I had not succeeded to learn the language of the place where I was living (not to a high level, anyway), and I had noticed some of the problems that arose due to this situation. Constant misunderstandings and wasted time. Tested patience on both sides, and with other people, often a lack of acceptance even if one did master the local language.

While searching for a new job, I was surfing the net a lot, and somehow I started to take an interest in Esperanto again. One of the first things I found was Don Harlow's book, which was fascinating. I downloaded the Brazilian Kurso de Esperanto, and got an American tutor named June Fritz for the class. I finished the course in about 3 months, and after 1 or 2 weeks of learning I entered the Ĝangalo chatroom.

After a couple months I could read Esperanto well, and text chat in it. I only spoke the language maybe 5 times in the first two years. I guess it was in December 2006 or so that the DC Esperanto club started meeting again, and I started going to meetings. In early 2008, I got a computer that uses Skype, and started voice chatting with people all over the world. May of this year I went to my first national congress in St. Louis. Fall 2008 I went to Armenia, and used Esperanto overseas for the first time, just in my own travels through local Esperanto contacts.

I first heard Esperanto in the opening to the game Final Fantasy XI. I first wrote it off as Latin, since SquareEnix LOVES Latin in it's music. I didn't give it much though until I was listening to the soundtrack and was like "OK so what are they singing about." Being super anal about translation, *I* was going to translate the lyrics *myself*, sure that they were translated wrong!" So off I went to get a "machine translation" to get a literal output of the lyrics. I looked up the lyrics and all the websites listed the language as: Esperanto. I thought to myself, "So it's something like Spanish in Spanish?" a quick trip to Babelfish showed me that it wasn't Spanish in Spanish or anything like that. I then tried Italian, Portugese, French and a few other selections on the menu. It just wouldn't translate. So I thought to myself... "It's probably a dialect of Spanish like how people say it's Mandrin or Cantonese." So I did a word search that didn't give me much. Finally after thinking I had almost outsmarted this Esperanto thing as being a dialect or some such, I just typed it into Google. Out came pages of UEA, ELNA and so on. I was like .. "Naaah.. couldn't be that...could it?" So digging deeper I read a bit about the language and what it was about (and later went on to read about the composer and why it was in Esperanto to begin with.)

To this day I have never gotten around to going back and translating those lyrics for myself xD

I'm not fluent in the language, still a beginner, but I just recently completed the pacujo.net course. :3 One of the better courses in my opinion.

I was stationed in Japan, bored. I started looking for a hobby that wouldn't cost any money but would be interesting, and started researching constructed languages. Klingon was appealing, but there's so few people who speak it and lacks some polish. I then ran across a short introduction to Esperanto and was put off by the fact that it sounded too much like Spanish. (Little did I know how much I'd appreciate that later.) I spent a month or so learning Lojban, and realized that, like Klingon, it was more or less useless. Interesting, but useless. So I started learning Esperanto. I took the course at pacujo.net, and I was hooked! Lo and behold, the tiny little library on the base had a copy of Teach Yourself Esperanto! It hadn't been checked out in over a decade. I believe it was a first edition. What impossible odds, to find an Esperanto book in such a place!

Once I learned Esperanto, I realized I had seen it before: it's used in training exercises in the Navy. Or at least it was while I was still in the service. It was not a surprise when I heard about it being, "The Aggressor Language."

I'm amazed how many doors have opened for me because of Esperanto. I've gotten several jobs and several more interviews because of Esperanto. I've got friends all over the world. It's probably one of the main things people remember about me (though, I admit to being an all-around strange bird, so it might not be the only thing that sticks in people's minds about me.) My introduction to the Baha'i Faith came because of Esperanto. Honestly, I can think of few areas of my life which have not been improved by learning Esperanto. I wish I had known about it much sooner.

This was in 1980. An elderly neighbor died, and I was allowed to rummage through his book collection. He had an old school book from around 1920 or something. It had a little poem that went like this:
Hundido krias baŭ ŭaŭ ŭau
Katido krias miau miau miah
Ŝafido krias baa baa baa
Infano krias maa maa maa!
I never forgot that poem.
Ĉu ĝi ne estas amuza, ke mi ankoraŭ memoris tion?

And since I was a language geek as a young child (I learned Russian and Mandarin by age 9..that's another story), Esperanto was a lot easier than Russian!I actualy dropped E-o for quite a few years, and after I was diagnosed with MS (alia rakonto!) I took up Esperanto again to help with my memory. Since MS destroys my memory as well, I figured it would take me a long time to get fluent. Actually 2 years later of almost daily reading, and increasing mŭ vocab, I can run with the big dogs! (Mi ankoraŭ devas fari tiun ekzamenon ĉe lernu) Mi volas traduki iujn infanlibrojn nun.
Ja vere "La Kato in la Ĉapelo" aŭ "Verdaj ovoj kaj Ŝinko"...

I also don't remember when I first heard of it. I know I was aware of it during my early teen years if not earlier, since I recall we had some humor book at home that was a parody catalog of odd tourist gadgets, and it included an Esperanto tourist phrasebook, and I'm pretty sure I understood at least vaguely what Esperanto was at that point. So Esperanto was on my radar for most of my life, but not something that actively interested me.

Years passed before I actively decided to learn Esperanto, in 2003. That story is already told here:
http://esperanto-usa.org/en/node/359