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Education

How Many Readers Speak Esperanto? 219

Posted by Cliff from the tongue-tied-polyglot dept.
lifebouy asks: "I just read a story about a high school that teaches Esperanto. I've noticed the majority of Esperantists I have met are IT professionals, perhaps because it nurtures our need to explore new things. So I was wondering, how many Slashdot readers speak Esperanto? Has anyone else noticed the high rate of IT Esperantists?"
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How Many Readers Speak Esperanto? More

How Many Readers Speak Esperanto?

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  • Esperanto, for what? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm learning mandarin chinese. It's actually quite useful for me - for one I get to access all sorts of new media; and I can talk to so many other people. Why bother learning an artificial language? It's hard enough learning a useful one, and I can't spend any time on the artificials. (I like the asian languages more than european though; they're more interesting to me).
    • Take a look at this:

      Esperanto and Language Awareness [esperantic.org]

      If you look under "Major Contributions" a little ways down the page you will some experimental evidence to suggest that if you only know one language now, learning Esperanto before learning another language may help you to learn a different language faster. To quote the page:

      The headmaster of a secondary school near Manchester, England, found consistently over an 18-year period that pupils who learned Esperanto for a year acquired a level of fluency

      • The headmaster of a secondary school near Manchester, England, found consistently over an 18-year period that pupils who learned Esperanto for a year acquired a level of fluency in the language equivalent to four years of French study, and subsequently achieved a higher level in French after three years of study than those pupils who learned only French for four years.

        And this has what to do with Esperanto, exactly? Studies have shown that learning any second language makes third and subsequent language

    • Well then, here's some irony for you: the main reason I originally learned Esperanto was to communicate with Chinese people, and become acquainted with Chinese literature. Esperanto is big in China, just check out the Cxina Interreta Informa Centro [china.org.cn] if you need proof--and there is a great amount of Chinese literature availiable in Esperanto translation. This is better than reading Chinese lit in English or another European language, because in those translations it is a native speaker of the European langu
  • Remember Incubis [incubusthefilm.com]?, William Shatner's foray into Esperanto language film? No? Me neither.
    • No I don't, but I do remember Arnold Rimmer's vain attempts to learn Esperanto on Red Dwarf.

      Lister: I hope that when you arrive the weather will be clement.
      Rimmer: Wrong, wrong, wrong, couldn't be wronger.
      Tape: I hope that when you arrive the weather will be clement.

  • Probably a very small number (Score:3, Funny)

    by the_other_one ( 178565 ) * on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:18PM (#7179335) Homepage
    You will probably find that there are more /.'rs that claim to have programed 6502's by typing in hex codes.

  • Here's some Esperanto ranto (Score:5, Funny)

    by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:27PM (#7179394) Journal
    So I was wondering, how many Slashdot readers speak Esperanto?

    Look it's one thing to assume that /.ers
    • don't have girlfriends,
    • live in Mom's basement,
    • playing Evercrack all day,
    • while filling their already sagging bellies with Fritos and Mountain Dew
    • and forgetting to wash.


    That's ok, and it's probably true.

    But implying they are so nerdy as to speak Esperanto?

    That, sir, goes too far!

    For that, we will duel with plastic "light sabers" at dawn! (Nerd dawn that is, 1 PM local time.)
    • I found your post amusing up until the point that I realized I was eating Fritos AND Drinking a Mountain Dew...

      Bastard :|


    • I'm a nerd. All but one of the laundry-list assumptions are false in my case. And I'm considering learning Esperanto. Why? Because the reasons listed here [esperanto.net] are pretty good ones.

      Esperanto is not meant to be a replacement primary language. It's meant to be a useful fallback, a common secondary language. Oh no! Increased communication abilities! Not here! Not on slashdot!

      • I'm a nerd. All but one of the laundry-list assumptions are false in my case. And I'm considering learning Esperanto. Why? Because the reasons listed here are pretty good ones.

        Really? I'd be genuinely interested to know which ones you found to be "pretty good". I skimmed through the FAQ (especially part 9) and all their answers struck me as either non-sequiturs or downright stupid.

        Esperanto is not meant to be a replacement primary language. It's meant to be a useful fallback, a common secondary

        • Or at least invent some sort of giant red forehead tattoo for Esperanto speakers so you can find your one counterpart among the thousand people you'll see in a week.

          Hey good idea! I've put some work into it, and I think this tattoo design is both simple and obvious. Since I can't set colors in a /. comment, I'll substitute a bold font.

          Here's the tattoo I think is the best:

          L O S E R

          (However, a friend suggested this one; it's a bit more complex, but is perhaps even more accurate:

          K L I N G O N .

        • There is not, and never will be, any situation anyplace on earth outside of an Esperanto convention where you can find an Esperanto speaker more easily than you can find an English speaker.

          I think their FAQ disproves this myth quite handily, so I won't bother. From your list of suggestions, I've already studied French and Russian, but the point remains (also in their FAQ) that I am at a permanent major disadvantage when conversing with a native French or Russian speaker. Artificial languages help lev

    • To the people who say that Esperanto is useless etc: Look, usefulness isn't the only reason to learn anything.

      Sure, we'd be better off learning German or some real language (actually, I've done that. I have a working knowledge of German, Chinese, etc.). But consider the effort and time required to pick up those languages. (it took me a couple of months to just wrap my mind around the nominative, accusative, dative and genitive in German). In contrast, Esperanto can be picked up fairly easily. You can get a
      • So why should any geek learn Esperanto? For all the above reasons, but most of all:

        Because we can.

        Why should any geek learn to have a sense of humor?

        Because my post was a joke.

        What's Esperanto for "Lighten up and laugh"? Sheesh.

      • So why should any geek learn Esperanto? For all the above reasons, but most of all: Because we can.

        The biggest reason NOT to learn Esperanto? Opportunity cost.

        There is no payoff to learning it. It's a completely useless exercise. Why not spend that time learning something else that would be infinitely more interesting? Learn to play the piano. Learn to draw. Learn to fly an airplane. Hell, learn to read an ancient language such as Latin so you can read certain literature the way it was originally writt

        • Why not spend that time learning something else that would be infinitely more interesting?

          So you aren't interested in languages. But that is indeed an interest of many geeks, so the other things aren't infinitely more interesting.

          Hell, learn to read an ancient language such as Latin so you can read certain literature the way it was originally written.

          You could learn Esperanto so you can read certain literature the way it was originally written, too. Part of the point of Esperanto is that learning Lati
      • You make a good point about etymology. If you
        know esperanto, you've been exposed to the
        rudiments of a number of different european
        languages as a result. But I have to ask
        whether you wouldn't have gained more general
        knowledge by studying an ancient root language
        such as latin or koine greek.

  • Esperanto? (Score:3, Funny)

    by shfted! ( 600189 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:45PM (#7179524) Journal
    Mi paroli ne esperanto, vi malg^entila bul!



    (For those that don't get it, it's a rough translation of "I don't speak esperanto, you insensitive clod!")

  • How many here speak Esperanto? (Score:3, Funny)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:51PM (#7179564) Homepage Journal
    Nulo.

  • Learning Esperanto the fun way! (Score:3, Informative)

    by deek ( 22697 ) * on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:52PM (#7179569) Homepage Journal

    For those who are interested in learning more about Esperanto, I recommend visiting this website [esperanto.ca]. It even has its own rather unique mascot. Perfect for making people feel at ease ... I know that a green goblin-like character always works for me.

    As Rimmer would say: "Bonvoro alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano en mia bideo!" And I think we all know what that means.

    DeeK
    • As Rimmer would say: "Bonvoro alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano en mia bideo!" And I think we all know what that means.

      Of course. "Please send for the porter, there appears to be a frog in my bidet!".

      (Sorry, couldn't help myself :) ).

      Yaz.

  • I dont think so. I have learned gibberish [reference.com] instead. It is more commonly used these days. Atleast all of my relatives/foe seems to be speaking gibberish to me. And being a techie, I avoid any contact except by email. And 90% of the email I get is gibberish (spam).
    So now tell who is better off. Someone who speak esperanto or gibberish????

  • a joke i once heard... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Doviende ( 13523 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:57PM (#7179605) Homepage
    I heard this in germany:

    If a person who speaks 3 languages is "trilingual" and a person who speaks 2 languages is "bilingual", then what do you call a person who speaks 1 language?
    Answer: American

    I think this illustrates the image that many people around the world have. Just about everyone in Europe seems to speak multiple languages. Perhaps Esperanto would be a good way for americans to get with the program globally ;)

    • Just about everyone in Europe seems to speak multiple languages.

      And the second language is invariably English. No, I'm serious. English is the defacto universal language. Sorry France, but the Lingua Franca now comes from the other side of the channel. When I visited Europe I tried speaking German in France. Very few Frenchmen knew German. But everyone knew English.

      Since the lingua franca is English, there's little incentive for native English speakers to learn another language. Plus, at least in the US,
      • Yeah, after all, if you learn another language all you get is a whole new area of literature to read, a whole different culture that opens itself to you, and a new and different way of thinking. Not worth the trouble, eh?

        • "Yeah, after all, if you learn another language all you get is a whole new area of literature to read, a whole different culture that opens itself to you, and a new and different way of thinking. Not worth the trouble, eh?"

          Man. You sound like my Spanish teacher. Come on. This is why we have translations. There is a *huge* range of thoughts and ideas in English. No one has enough time to capture the whole range of ideas in their own language, let alone another ten.

          Spanish is an interesting language with a

          • You sound like my Spanish teacher. Come on. This is why we have translations. There is a *huge* range of thoughts and ideas in English.

            That's like saying there's no reason to try a papaya or mango because you can get those flavors as slurpees at 7-Eleven. A translation is a translation. It may be very good and have artistic finesse of its own, but it's not the original.

            And yes, there are more books and ideas written natively in English than you could ever absorb. That doesn't mean you wouldn't benefit

            • I totally agree with this. I took two quarters of Japanese in college (not enough to be useful without a lot of outside work and practice) because I thought it would be cool. I wish now that I had taken French or Spanish (which I thought to be "boring" at the time).

              I now realize that I would rather be able to read Spanish or French or Italian because of the wealth of literature available. Yes, most of it is available translated into English, but it doesn't *feel* right sometimes. I always wonder how mu
          • Says someone who doesn't speak a second language.

            I'm sorry, but you're, how to say it, wrong. I'm fluent in German and manage literary Chinese, and I can tell you from experience how unsatisfactory translations are.

            And ... you can't tell me from experience that I'm wrong.
      • It is also a matter of size and wealth. Did you know that all Pilots and air traffic control people are required to speak Engilsh? A french pilot landing in Spain will get his instructions and talk to the tower in English. Why? After WWII when they where setting up airline routes only the US and the UK where large enought and healthy enough to have large airlines. So it is English.
        The other reason that people tend to speak english only is that the US is so large that many people if not most spend there whol
    • " Just about everyone in Europe seems to speak multiple languages."

      That's because you need at least two languages to effectively communicate in Europe (at least your nation's language and English). Here in the US, we can go anywhere in a nation the size of the EU, as well as most of Canada, without having to speek any other language than English.

      In Europe, you need French and Italian and German and Spanish and English if you want to be able to communicate fluently. Yes, English has become the language of
      • I have to call BS for this!

        I've been to the US, they don't all speak one language!

        I spent time in Georgia and then I went to New York (where I met someone from Minnesota). No one can claim these are all the same language, they are too dissimilar!

        I won't even begin with the travesty of calling what they speak "English"!

    • Here's the funny part:

      Europe is extremely proud of it's phone system. They standardized on GSM early and it has paid off with near universal coverage and compatibility. Europe is now proud to be unifying their currency to enable more open commerce between countries. Europe is also proud of the EU, which unifies regulations and law (to a degree), also allowing greater trade and unity between all of the nations in Europe.

      Wonder why people never learn more than 1 language in the US? It's because they don't r
    • I think this illustrates the image that many people around the world have. Just about everyone in Europe seems to speak multiple languages.

      I have to say, as an Englishman who has lived and worked in the US, that this stereotype is largely unfounded. Most of the Americans I know also speak another language, for example Spanish or Russian or Hebrew or Japanese - and to a far higher standard than I speak any foreign languages (in my case, French and Dutch).

    • Most colleges in the US will not let you in unless you either speak a second language (2 years high school). They will make exceptions easially enough, but you cannot graduate unless you take a second language in college. To be more accureate, you need either 2 years in high school, or 1 in college. If you speak two languages but didn't take any classes to get it, that doesn't count.

      Most americans at one time spoke two languages. Most have forgotten the second because there is no call for it. Those w

    • Perhaps Esperanto would be a good way for americans to get with the program globally

      I think we would be content for them to master English!
    • I heard this in Spain while I was living there for three months:

      Me: habla ingles?
      90% of the Spanish populace: no

      Granted a lot of people in Europe seemed to know some broken English, to make it sound as if everyone in Europe speaks it fluently is very misleading.
    • Go to the central point of the U.S and travel 500 miles in any direction. Then find out the prominent language. And then from that point travel another 500 miles in any direction and find out the prominent language. It'll be English both times. Try that in any European country. You'll most likely run into three different languages from start to the first point and to the second point. You're probably also passing through a number of different locales with yet other dominant languages. It's all about
  • Mi tre ofte uzas Esperanton je la interreto. Gxi estas utila lingvo por trovi kaj paroli kun tiuj, kiuj venas ek diversaj kaj ofte ne tre konataj landoj aux kulturoj. Vi devus lerni gxin!

    (La sekvaj vortoj ne estas traduko, sed aliaj pensoj).

    I often use Esperanto on the net, for which it's very well suited. It's quite the useful language for speaking with people from diverse backgrounds on an equal footing. The threads on soc.culture.esperanto are some of the most interesting I've ever read/participate
  • I like the idea of esperanto. After the trouble I've had with French any easy to learn language is very appealling...

    I also feel bad speaking to people in English when I'm abroad but most people always seem to speak English better than I speak their native language.

    Still I'm wondering if it's really worth learning Esperanto. Any idea of how many people actually speak esperanto?

    Also more to the point, have any of the esperanto speakers here actually used esperanto to speak to someone who didn't speak Eng
    • Still I'm wondering if it's really worth learning Esperanto.

      Yes, but maybe not for the reasons you initially think. There have been studies that have shown that people who learn Esperanto as their second language can pickup other human languages (like French) suprisingly faster than people who only know their native language. Learning Esperanto can thus help accelerate and improve your ability to learn other languages.

      Yaz.

  • Esperanto for n00bs... (Score:3, Informative)

    by PHPee ( 559830 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @11:31PM (#7179856) Homepage
    Before reading this post, I have only heard about Esperanto a few times. I always assumed it was some sort of Spanish dialect or something, not knowing any better.

    So, I did a bit of research and found that Esperanto is actually a very interesting language. Apparently it is an "artificial" language, created by Dr. L. L. Zamenhof and published in 1887. The concept was to to be a "middle ground" language, facilitating communication between people of different backgrounds or cultures. Esperanto is apparently much easier to learn than many national languages and was designed to be a straight-forward neutral language. Surprisingly, there are an estimated 2 million Esperanto speakers in the world.

    Check out some of these interesting links that I found:
    Esperanto FAQ [esperanto.net]
    What, why, who and where info about Esperanto [esperanto.org]
    Previously mentioned educational Esperanto site with the little green goblin, "Zam" [esperanto.ca]
    • Surprisingly, there are an estimated 2 million Esperanto speakers in the world.

      Assuming that there are roughly 8 billion people on earth, that means the odds of any particular person speaking esperanto are roughly 0.025%, slightly better than the odds of dealing a four-of-a-kind hand in poker on the first try, which comes in at 0.024%.

  • I'd rather code in Oberon!

    Bonus points to anyone asides myself who *has* coded in Oberon.
  • i'm trying to learn... slowly. This page is of great use in the meantime [insultmonger.com].

    one of these days i'll program in esperanto.
  • How Many Readers Speak Esperanto?

    Ok, someone has to ask (you know, the whole stereotype thing and everything):

    How many Readers Speak Klingon? Are there more klingon speakers than esperanto speakers in Slashdot?

  • A glaring omission (Score:3, Troll)

    by sakusha ( 441986 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @12:45AM (#7180285)
    I can see that this web page missed out on listing esperanto:

    http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=a rt icle&articleid=24184

    Esperanto is known to amateur linguists as a "conlang" (constructed language), a class that includes everything from Klingon to Elvish. There used to be a conlang fool I saw spouting off on the net about how he had invented a new conlang, it was a combination of Japanese and Maltese as if it would be spoken by a dinosaur with enormous nasal cavities. I kid you not. And these people expect to be taken seriously?
    If you want to be understood by the largest number of people, you'll study Chinese. If you want to be understood by the greatest number of technologists, you study English or Japanese. If you want to be understood by the greatest number of idiots, you study esperanto.
    • I have to agree that many conlangs are essentially masturbatory works: playthings, pet projects or (shudder) fanfic. But Esperanto (and several others, Esperanto is just the "best of breed") are different. They were constructed to address the language problem, which is essentially this:
      Learning another natural language (well) is *hard*, and once you've done it you only know one more, you can converse with some new subset of the world populace, and at a sub-native fluency. You're still at a disadvantage a

      • Buisness could be conducted and treatys negotiated without one party being at a disadvantage

        Who exactly is at a disadvantage when business is conducted in a language where one party has less than native fluency?

        Unless you're trying to sell Monty Python dictionaries ("My hovercraft is full of eels") to the Chinese or something, I'd argue that both parties are equally disadvantaged. In my work I deal with non-fluent speakers and in various languages all the time and I don't see where one party gets any

        • It's not just critical mass, it's thousands of years of evolution in use. Esperanto nerds seem to have this stupid idea that languages are something written down in stone and do not evolve. Quite the contrary, today's languages have evolved and become more useful, more descriptive, more flexible over time. Given that esperanto has none of that history, it will always be inferior to any currently spoken language.
          I'd just be happy if native English speakers practiced their English skills instead of wasting ti
        • we'll be back to banging rocks and referring to all objects as "urk."

          Ah, that explains my co-workers.
    • Esperanto is known to amateur linguists as a "conlang" (constructed language), a class that includes everything from Klingon to Elvish. There used to be a conlang fool I saw spouting off on the net about how he had invented a new conlang, it was a combination of Japanese and Maltese as if it would be spoken by a dinosaur with enormous nasal cavities. I kid you not. And these people expect to be taken seriously?

      There used to be a programming fool I saw spouting off on the net about how he had a webserver r

  • Mi malbone parolas g^in. Mi lernis hejme.

    I'm a bit rusty, having not paid much attention to my Esperanto studies for the last little while, but one of these days I'm going to start up again. I have several Esperanto books, including a copy of "The Diary of Anne Frank" I bought at Anne Frank house in Amsterdam last time I was there. It was rather funny purchasing it -- the people in the bookstore thought I had brought it with me, even though I plucked it off their shelf (presumably the people at the til

    • malsanulejo. It's actuall a "constructed" word, with the following breakdown:
      ...
      Sheer beauty.

      Sounds doubleplusungood to me.
    • Some people think that only artificial languages can be regular. This is not the case. Both Turkish and Finnish are agglutinative languages, which have many suffixes, were each suffix represents a destinct concept.
  • Most of the geeks I know took German or Latin. Except for one. He got forced into Spanish because German wouldn't fit his schedule and French was closed. He was placed into Spanish. But if you high school employs more than one Spanish teacher like mine did, there's always room for another student council member.

  • A brief note to those of you seeing Esperanot writen for the first time. Esperanto uses 6 accented characters -- five of which (c, g, h, j, and s) use a cricumflex ('^') over them when accented, and one of which ('u') uses a breve (a upturned half-circle). These six characters exist in non-accented versions as well.

    It was recognized early in the life of Esperanto that some printers (the profession, not the peripheral) may have problems handling these characters -- they probably wouldn't have the necess

    • You use Dvorak keyboards !?

      How do you find them? What is your profession? (what do you primarily do on these keyboards).

      My reason for asking is that these days I find my self frequently switching between German & English keyboards and I find it much easier to code on an English keyboard, but it is difficult to use for composing documentation on it. Any way the shifting about of these keys only bothered me for a few weeks, and now I'm OK with that, So I'm thinking hey moving these letters about isn't so

      • How do you find them? What is your profession? (what do you primarily do on these keyboards).

        I'm a software developer/computer scientist. And you really on't need to find a specific Dvorak keyboard -- you can re-map an existing keyboard by moving the keycaps around, and then selecting the Dvorak keyboard keymap in your OS. Linux, OS/2, MacOS, Windows, and all other major (and many not-so-major) OSs come with out-of-the-box support for Dvorak keyboards.

        My primary keyboard is an old Honeywell WN-101 -- bu

  • I remember from my youth a National Lampoon article entitled "How to Swear in Esperanto". It contained an assortment of curses ("May your penis be struck by lightning") and handy phrases ("Pardon me, could you direct me to the nearest medical facility? My penis has just been struck by lightning").

    Alas, the article is lost to antiquity. But a Google search produces this useful vocabulary list. [everything2.org]

  • I'm a full-time volunteer for the World Esperanto Youth Organization [tejo.org] in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. As of July 2002, I've been speaking Esperanto as my primary language travelling for six months through Brazil and Europe and then volunteering here starting in January 2003. I'm also a board member of Esperanto@Internet [ikso.net] which has done projects like lernu! [lernu.net] which is one of the best free language teaching environments online as well as the founder of the Wikipedia in Esperanto [wikipedia.org] which has over 8,000 encyclopedia

  • The single most useful language for cheap travel (Score:3, Interesting)

    by UnuMondo ( 642324 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @04:44AM (#7181068) Homepage

    I learned Esperanto in 1996 and it has proven very useful. I travelled through Europe several times, staying at no cost at the homes of Esperantists, and finally moved there for good by first working for an Esperanto youth organisation in Holland. It's been a ticket to lower-cost travel, a genuinely international social life, and ironically more effective learning of national languages.

    For those who would say that learning English or Mandarin is more important because there are more speakers, the traveller to, for example, Chile can't just call up any English speaker there and request free lodging and hospitality. With Esperanto, however, that's pretty common. In spite of the smaller number of speakers, Esperanto is much more useful for travel.

    However, Esperanto is pretty useless if you spend all your time in the US. A lot of American Esperantists, though, end up leaving the US like I did after they learn the language because it's a ticket to a much more diverse and interesting world.

  • ...more people speak Klingon than speak Esperanto.

    Unfortunately, I don't know if it's true; snopes doesn't have anything. Can anyone shed any light?


  • Who cares why anyone should bother with Esperanto, when they have a language of perfect unambiguity, such as English.

  • So I was wondering, how many Slashdot readers speak Esperanto?

    Since you asked: I do.

  • I started to do the email course, but got busy and forgot to finish it. It is only like 10 lessons. Personally, I really like Esperanto for the way that it doesn't matter what order the words are in. For example, in Esperanto, "I pet the dog", "Dog I pet the", and "the I dog pet" all mean exactly the same -- because it encodes the words themselves with what part of speech they are. Very clever.
    • All those sentences you cited convey the same meaning in English, but only one of them doesn't sound stupid. I'll bet it's the same in Esperanto: there is a conventional word order, but inflection makes it technically superfluous, but people will still look at you like you've grown a second head if you use a weird one.
      • I'll bet it's the same in Esperanto: there is a conventional word order, but inflection makes it technically superfluous

        I take it you've never studied Esperanto, or Latin or any other language without a conventional word order, at all? If you mark cases, like Esperanto and Latin do, then there's no need for a conventional word order. In Esperanto, accusative case is marked with an n; i.e. the cat pet the dog-n and the dog-n pet the cat mean the same thing, because the n tells you who's doing what to whom.

        • If you mark cases, like Esperanto and Latin do, then there's no need for a conventional word order

          In other words, "inflection makes [word order] technically superfluous". If you're going to condescend, it helps to know the vocabulary of the field.

          Despite the fact that it doesn't have to, Latin strongly favors Subject-Object-Verb word order in practice, and (as I said) I suspect that Esperanto also has a "normal" way of saying things, in the sense that people look at you funny if you say stuff the oth

          • In other words, "inflection makes [word order] technically superfluous".

            Inflection also means "A slide, modulation, or accent of the voice". Since you said that you thought it was the same in English as Esperanto, that is the definition I thought you were using.

            Esperanto also has a "normal" way of saying things, in the sense that people look at you funny if you say stuff the other way around all the time.

            Weirdly enough, when you're speaking a language that's spoken by almost all non-native speakers,
            • Good point; I suppose people will look at you as though you've grown a second head just for speaking Esperanto at all, and word order issues will just be moot.

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