TY ESPERANTO

by John Cresswell, John Hartley

This comprehensive course aims to enable readers to reach a good standard of fluency in the international language of Esperanto. Esperanto has a straightforward grammar and a completely regular, phonetic system of spelling and pronunciation, making it much easier to learn than any national language. The carefully constructed course is designed to help readers master the essentials of Esperanto quickly, and to achieve basic fluency in the written and spoken language now used by eight million Esperantists world wide. Every aspect of the language is clearly presented and explained, with numerous examples. Reading passages and dialogues reinforce readers' understanding of how the language works, while also helping to build up an extensive vocabulary. Exercises, with answers, enable readers to check progress throughout the course, and the two-way vocabulary lists provide a mini-dictionary which is ideal for the beginner. An index is also included for easy reference.

Genres: Language, Nonfiction, Reference, Linguistics, Textbooks

259 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1957

Reviews

[Manny]

I have over the years read a fair number of books in the Teach Yourself series (every used book shop seems to have a few, generally priced at around two or three dollars), and my experience is that the quality varies a great deal, from excellent to almost worthless. This is one of the good ones. The authors promise you at the beginning that if you already know something about linguistics you'll be able to acquire a solid grounding in Esperanto with no more more than a dozen hours of study, and they do not disappoint. I started the book a week ago: now, looking at the online copy of La eta princo which I located here, I find I can understand almost everything.

Esperanto is more interesting than I had realised! In particular, the ingenious system of prefixes and suffixes allows creative coining of new words. More about that when I've finished La eta princo.

[Nathan Albright]

This book answers a question I had when reviewing a previous book that had been paired with this one [1]. In many ways the two books are a bit of a yin and a yang. The dictionary has a fairly rudimentary and straightforward and short discussion of grammar and then a focused and expansive selection of words in its vortolistoj (word lists) between the two languages. This book is the mirror image of that, with an expansive selection of questions and exercises and short texts and dialogues and a short and rudimentary set of words between the two languages, mostly organized thematically rather than in alphabetical order by root or word, at least for the most part. As someone who has read quite a few books that serve as lessons for Esperanto in some manner [2], this one carves out its own niche by providing example of the sorts of texts that one would see if one visited Esperantujo (Esperantoland) and wanted to spend one's hard-earned staroj (stars, the name of the imaginary (?) Esperanto currency) on various good and services. In giving a certain vision of what an Esperanto culture looks like in print, this book does a solid job for the beginning student, especially in the United Kingdom.

For a fairly ordinary-sized book of about 250 pages, this book manages to include a fair assortment of varied materials. The core of the book consists of about 180 pages divided into fifteen lessons. The lessons range in subject material from family and house to a room to a town to a letter to holidays, the weather, television and radio, nature, the web, the life of Einstein, advertisements, hobbies, letters to the editors, weekend, and miscellaneous worldwide information. The chapters themselves include various subject matters related to grammar, along with texts and dialogue and exercises to translate from English into Esperanto and Esperanto into English. After these materials comes the answer key to all of the exercises, which makes this like a teacher's guide for somewhat more formal instruction of Esperanto--this book has the feel of the language books in Spanish I grew up studying as part of my own formal foreign language education. The last part of the book contains a short and rudimentary dictionary divided into English-Esperanto and Esperanto-English. The book as a whole can be taken gradually by an individual learner or can be a part of a formal program for studentoj, although one can imagine such programs are probably a bit rare.

This is a remarkable book, in that it provides at least a hint of what an Esperanto reader would look like and gives a lot of clever words and phrases and samples of the language for people to read and translate and understand. The book is also remarkable in its sense of unity and generosity of spirit. The authors of the book state that someone can be considered an Esperantist after the first four of fifteen chapters if they speak it and write it and have mastered that material. This is a remarkably tolerant attitude, since the amount of hours it would take to become an Esperantist would not be particularly large, and because it would only be about a quarter of an elementary text on the subject. The extent to which this generosity of spirit is a desire to allow people to feel welcomed in a community of speakers, or because of the comparative ease of learning the language, or what. Perhaps that sort of thing will remain a mystery, but this book gives a glimpse into an interesting alternative universe, and that alone makes it worth reading and appreciating, besides its other considerable virtues.

[1] http://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017/...

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

http://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017/...

http://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017/...

http://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017/...

[Christopher]

After ten years in the movement, when I see people picking up a book like this, it's like someone saying "I'm going to join [name of cult]!". Drop this articial concoction and appreciate the incredible diversity of the world's real languages.

(I have written an essay on why you should stay away from rubbish like this book.)

[David]

La kutima libro por autodidaktaj usonanoj kaj britoj instrui Esperanton al si mem.

[Mark]

This book has been extremely helpful. I am nowhere near fluency in the language, but have a greater understanding of its logic now.

[David]

I need to go back to studying my Esperanto.

[Robert Budzul]

Good overall Esperanto grammar book.

[Ĝan Starling]

Sufiĉe helpa por komencanto. Prefere oni have ekzempleron de "Step by Step in Esperanto", laŭ mia opinio.

[The Bauchler]

This book popped into my head a few days ago.

I was a huge Harry Harrison fan way back when, and his writings were peppered with references to Esperanto – I think some books even had details of how to contact the Esperanto Society.

I saw this book in a charity shop and bought it.

I was filled with enthusiasm about being able to speak a second language, being able to wow my friends and amaze people with my fluency in the world’s newest language that promised in the future be a pan lingua franca.

My enthusiasm lasted about a week.

It was too difficult (for me) to understand and involved putting in a lot of time and effort that I simply didn’t possess.

So, it sat on my shelf for another 20 years before it was finally binned to make room for a more deserving book.

My memories of it are that it was a dry ‘old school’ textbook, like the ones I had been forced to read in the few Latin classes I attended before my teacher realised that learning one language was probably all I was capable of.

I think he was right😊

I have nothing but admiration - actually envy TBH - of those who are multi-lingual.

I'm looking pointedly at you, my European GR friends...

I am sure there are better ways of leaning a new language than this today.

A quick google search suggests that today up to 2 million might have some knowledge of Esperanto, studies estimate around 10,000 people are fluent, with 100,000 as active users.

A far cry from the hopes of Mr Harrison.

[H.M.]

Kaj nun komenciĝas la lernado...