I’ve never really learned another language. I took years of Spanish classes in school, but I got by with a very limited vocabulary and relied on translation apps for my assignments. I’ve never used the language since. In college I took a semester of Italian for a humanities credit, and never used that again either. I’m an introverted software engineer - I rarely speak to people in English and find myself with little need for another language. Either way, learning a language always felt like a box I needed to check to be a real “renaissance man”.
Enter Esperanto a constructed language that is designed to be as easy to learn as possible. I heard that if you’ve never learned another language then it’s best to start with the easiest language to learn - Esperanto. This would give you the confidence that you can in fact learn another language, at which point you can move on to an actually useful language.
I dedicated myself to Esperanto for a couple hours a day, using a mixture of lernu.net, duolingo, and some books that I bought. I became fascinated with the language. It seemed so well designed and everything just made sense. The ability to construct words based on common prefixes and suffixes made it easy for me to express myself even if I didn’t know the “real” word. For example, if I forgot the word “Ombrelo” for “Umbrella” - I could use prefix “contra-” (against) and suffix “-ilo” (device) with root word “pluvo” (rain) to get “contrapluvilo” - or “against rain device”. This ability to create words seemed magical to me.
I decided that I would do this for 3 months and see where I ended up. My goal was to read By the end of that period of study, I was actually somewhat confident in my ability to have a conversation in Esperanto. I never actually got to test that unfortunately. I stuck to my 90 days and decided not to continue, and not to learn another language. Unfortunately I just do not have a compelling enough use case for any other spoken or written language to force myself to remain disciplined in learning one.