Bust honouring Zamenhof in Macedonia.
Problem
I just looked up how long it takes to learn a language, assuming you already know English.
Category 1 - 24 weeks - 600 class hours
I already know French. The table compiled in Wikipedia says the easy, popular languages for me would be
Italian
Spanish and
Portuguese.
They would all take up to 24 weeks of 600 class hours. Actually they tell you the lowest and highest number of hours. I am assuming I would learn slowly.
Exactly the languages I would choose, what I thought.
After that, other relatively easy languages for me, taking category one of time, would be Dutch, Romanian and Swedish.
Category 2 750 hours, 36 weeks
Not surprisingly,
German is in the next category.
All the other languages in this category take longer, 900 hours.
Category 2B - 44 weeks -Other alphabets
Greek, Hebrew and Russian are going to take me 44 weeks, each, How many hours, each?
Category 3 - Oriental Languages 88 weeks a whopping 2,200 class hours. And you'd better spend half those hours living in the country.
However, there's one easy language which beats all of these.
Esperanto
Only six weeks and 150 class hours!
There's only one problem. Harder to find people who speak it. No country does. No famous literature or places to visit. I've never met anybody who spoke it.
They do have pen pals and conferences.
The first page about them on wikipedia is very encouraging. For example, they solve the problem of the dangling participle. The sentence which reads 'I read a book looking out of the window' can be sorted in Esperanto, where you can see who is doing what to whom.
So if you are sitting at home bored, or already know a dozen languages (0.5 percent of the world's population are polyglots) you could add Esperanto as your next language.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Esperanto/Appendix/Summary_of_grammar#Dangling
Monuments to Zamenhof
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/17377928/ludovic-lazarus-zamenhof
You can learn Esperanto for free on
Duolingo.com
Fast Facts
Esperanto was created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887.
The point of Esperanto is to have a politically neutral language.
Wikipedia puts it like this:
1,000 have Esperanto as their native language.
10,000 speak it fluently.
100,000 can use it actively.
1,000,000 understand a large amount passively.
10,000,000 have studied it to some extent at some time.
https://en.
Landmarks to visit connected with Zamenhof
wikipedia.org/wiki/L._L._Zamenhof
You can see an exhibition about Zamenhof in the Zamenhof centre in Bialystok in NE Poland.
Picture of the exterior of the building by Sunridin, in Wikipedia, which gives you details about copyright of pictures from there.
https://wikitravel.org/en/Białystok
They say:
Another site worth visiting is the whole of Warszawska street, with rows of unspoilt architecture spanning all of 19th century. The particular highlight is the big palace painted in light pink, the former residence of the Prussian Governor of the Bialystok region during the short times in 19th century (1795-1815) when Bialystok was under German rule. The building was later transformed into a school, a purpose it serves to this day (now the King Sigismund Augustus High School). It is here that Ludwik Zamenhoff was taught. The school has another infamous alumnus - Ignacy Hryniewiecki, assassin the Tzar of Russia.
https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/poland
https://www.poland.travel/en-gb
Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
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