kaŝperanto:

bartlett22183:It may be something similar with Esperanto (or any other constructed auxiliary language). If I can read most of a (relatively simple) text needing only a small amount of dictionary lookup but can write it only with a lot of lookup and have never even had the opportunity to try to converse in it, do I really "speak" Esperanto?

I also find that once I have spent a few minutes immersed I can much more easily read/write and listen without problems. Other people who have attended even short (on the order of days) Esperanto events claim that such a short period of total immersion greatly increased their ability to write and speak (and think) in Esperanto.

I think you do have a legitimate point here. I have been in and around the constructed international auxiliary language field for many, many years, but I confess that I have never really committed myself to any one of them. (The two with which I have had most familiarity are Interlingua and Esperanto, the only two I think have any ghost of a chance of more widespread use in the western countries.) So yes, it is all too easy to remain not merely an eterna komencanto but an eternal dabbler. I suppose that with the few years I have left (I am no longer young) I ought to pick something and try to fully use and promote it.

bartlett22183:
I think you do have a legitimate point here. I have been in and around the constructed international auxiliary language field for many, many years, but I confess that I have never really committed myself to any one of them. (The two with which I have had most familiarity are Interlingua and Esperanto, the only two I think have any ghost of a chance of more widespread use in the western countries.) So yes, it is all too easy to remain not merely an eterna komencanto but an eternal dabbler. I suppose that with the few years I have left (I am no longer young) I ought to pick something and try to fully use and promote it.

That is kind of how I started out. I was a freshman/sophomore in college when I first discovered Esperanto, and I only really began taking it "seriously" about 2 years ago. It was only then that I decided I should plan to attend events, listen to music/podcasts, attempt to speak it, etc. Before then I usually just refreshed my grammar after 6 months or more of doing nothing in the language, and maybe memorized a few more common words before my interests took me elsewhere. I should mention here that I have a habit of picking up too many habits/hobbies to maintain.

I've similarly in the last 2 years began making some changes to how I go about my life. Formerly I was a shy, quiet, careful fellow who tried to take the safe path in everything. Taking Esperanto seriously is but one change I've forced myself to make. I've also started doing Crossfit even though I'm not a crazy health/workout nut (no offense to such people ), and I took up motorcycle riding. For me, all of these things were wants before, but I was just too lazy/scared to commit to them and stand my ground against criticism (telling some people you bought a bike is like saying you're suicidal for some reason).

I still dabble in all kinds of things, though, but I'm getting better. It is VERY easy to remain an eternal dabbler. It's never too late to change, though.

I also did some looking up. But then I deleted most of my info so I don't have much. Based on what exists online in Esperanto (number of blogs that are easily findable, subbed and dubbed shows, free stories to read, recipe websites, comic translations etc) there are more online speakers than Faroese, which has about 70.000. Of course, maybe all the Faroers are hidden and using other languages haha. But ex I only know of one communal recipe site in Faroese and EO at least two for vegan stuff alone.

How many books have been published in Esperanto? English Wiki says "Over 25,000 books" (uncited). The total literature of Iceland is under 50,000 books (according to this article) and there are about 330.000 native speakers of Icelandic plus it has a history of thousands of years, and in 2007 alone they published around 1.500 new books. What is a book though? Because I've bought Icelandic "books" that were only 8-20 pages long.

I thought there was a Wiki page that was a lot more exact on how many books per year have been published in Esperanto but I dunno where to find it. Either way, nowadays more and more people are publishing online through various services so they can't count them all...

On Wikipedia, as of the 14th of August 2014, Esperanto had 203.515 articles. Danish had 192.083 articles (with 5 million speakers), other languages with a similar article count included Basque (720.000 speakers), Slovak (5 million), and Kazakh (11 million). Some internet-related research on Esperanto, which includes how many Esperanto words are on the net and how many hits its Wikipedia pages get, pointed to to that it had around as many speakers online as Latvian (1.3 million), Lithuanian (4.1 million), and Slovak (5 million).... however of course, those stats are also affected by things like how many bots are viewing the pages.

The Duolingo course for Esperanto has around 4.600 people signed up for notifications for when it becomes possible to learn from it. This doesn't mean anything because all courses get way more learners once they're fully published, but it's a small indicator of how many people who use that site are interested in Esperanto.

As for native speakers, I have read of one in Sweden and it says his mother's parents "also spoke Esperanto" (if that means she's also a native, I don't know).

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I started trying to write and translate into Esperanto as soon as possible and there's apparently no sign of me stopping. I don't use it every day but I use it every week, so far. I'm just translating recipes and stories I like and then slowly working on writing my own stuff. But I'm not that good yet so it's a bit difficult to write my own original things. Actually I'm reading way too little of other people's works so my Esperanto is all weird and wrong I'm sure...

According to this Wiki page, there's about 100.000 total users but 350 active users, on the Esperanto wiki.

The active count is similar to Slovak, Hindi (180 million), Kazakh, Malayalam (38 million), and Bengali (210 million).

So if anyone can go find out the percentage of people from these populations who regularly go on the internet or Wikipedia....

Hi! Esperanto is the second translated language into Taboeba. See then: English 479.276; Esperanto 363.552; German 292.758; Italian 286.918; French 249.937.

The Faroese are probably a fairly tight knit community, ditto Icelanders. I can imagine this has an impact on Wikipedia usage.

It's also far easier to turn Swedish articles into Norwegian or Castillian into Catalan than trying to convert English to Irish, or Polish to Lithuanian.

Nephihaha:It's also far easier to turn Swedish articles into Norwegian or Castillian into Catalan than trying to convert English to Irish, or Polish to Lithuanian.

That's actually not how it usually works. When there is no Swedish article, I simply read the Norwegian, Danish or English. Other people would read the French or German instead. I wouldn't bother making my own since I can easily read the others : P Unless of course I was curious about how the knowledge differed between countries (ex. the English wiki suspiciously not mentioning that so-and-so famous is gay).

Furthermore, the Swedish articles at least, often don't copy info from another article - they often actually use outside sources and write their own, if the article is anything Swedes actually know about (medicine, nature, Nordic events for example - but usually not the USA's history). So you can have extremely different info on the Swedish and the English articles, but still no Norwegian or Danish article exists for example. But it's true that instead of going to Wikipedia people often even just post on their country-specific general forums (Hugi for Icelanders, Flackback for Swedes etc) or ask their country's science question-and-answer website for example.

So of course Wikipedia isn't THE basis for judging how many people go online but it's just one of the few that we have. It's also a semi-good judge of "how many speakers do we have who are very active and think themselves good enough to edit public Wiki texts" haha.

jdawdy:I think it's very interesting that here on Lernu, the Chinese forum is the third most active (in number of messages) after English and German, despite the lesser degree of penetration of the internet in China. Could China be an "iceberg" of Esperanto, with only the very tip of speakers visible?

I've been trying to find information on this (for some personal reasons, haha) but haven't found anything useful quite yet.

Oh, and by the way, it's not that the internet doesn't penetrate China. We have internet for sure. It's not like we don't have social networking and free video sites and cheap vendor sites, but we have a whole separate set of those services. In some cases, those services are (I won't say better but I will say) less expensive and more profound.

That being said, since China seems to have a tendency to keep to itself, it's possible that there is a whole Esperanto community waiting to emerge. China did recently host a UK, and there are plenty of clubs and organizations especially in the urban East part of China. (I'm in the rural west, so I feel a little lonely at times.)

Furthermore, if we reliably had these statistics, Chinese could become more interested in doing what would inadvertently contribute to la fina venko. The only reason China is interested in English (It's a hard language, especially the grammar. I should know: I teach it.) is because they think that all other foreigners speak it. They want to be able to communicate while traveling. Having studied abroad and traveled in a handful of Western countries, I know that an English-saturated world is not quite the case. Travelers might be much better off using la Pasporta Servo when traveling to a non-English-speaking country. Additionally, if the EU ever got around to making Esperanto an official language, that might also contribute to Chinese interest in the language.

tl;dr: I don't know how many in China know Esperanto, but China does have a lot of potential.

mjhinds57, I wonder if you would have an easier time (than the rest of us) finding various proof about how many Chinese schools have taught Esperanto or an estimate of a number of students? Often it seems that if people tell others about that, they go "oh that must be a lie, show me lots of proof" so it could be good to gather...

I speak esperanto okay, and intend to learn more. I know lots of people who speak esperanto well. None of whom have ever been to a UK or national convention. Those numbers can't be taken as the only speakers.