Getting Started With Esperanto: Kiel Komenci Esperanton

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Introduction : Enkonduko

Saluton! Esperanto is an international artificial language very easy to learn. It will let you communicate with some people in any country. I am just learning. If you see any mistakes please tell me at . This page is mostly in English because it is aimed at the novice Esperantist trying to get started viewing the wealth of Esperanto material on the web.

Accented Letters : Supersignaj Literoj

Without the proper font (Unicode39 or ISO 8859-340), you can't display the Esperanto accented letters properly.

There are five kludges to get around displaying accents:

1. Use the letter x (which never occurs naturally in Esperanto) just after the letter that should have been accented e.g. cxian. I like this convention best because it is unambiguous, quick to type, and displays universally without problems. I think Esperanto should be officially changed to drop the accented letters and use the x convention instead. X then behaves much like the letter h in English to change the sound of the preceding letter.
2. Put a circumflex just after the letter that should have been accented, e.g. c^ian.
3. Put a circumflex just before the letter that should have been accented, e.g. ^cian.
4. Use a trailing h as Zamenhof did. Use some accented letters, whatever happens to be available in your local character set. People, if not computers, will soon figure out what you mean. Unfortunately, this convention is not easily translated mechanically into the accented form.
5. Install special Esperanto ISO 8859-3 (Esperanto plus Turkish and some European languages) and use them in your style sheets. You also need to install the Turkish Language Pack to make Internet explorer work. Encode your pages as if there were in Turkish:
   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-3">
   Encode your accented characters with 8859-3 numeric entities such as ĉ &#230;

   San Serif SudEuro is a nice sans serif font. BookAntiqua Eo 10 point is a nice serifed font. Lucida Sans Unicode Eo is a nice Unicode san serif font. Tempo Esperanto is a nice Unicode fixed pitch font. Times Roman Eo, Arial Eo, Comic Sans MS Eo, Courier Eo are all Esperanto variants of these familiar fonts.

   If you want to be able to use Esperanto file names and Esperanto names for your program icons, click Control Panel, Display, Appearance and configure fonts for the various places Windows draws text. Brave souls may even use RegEdit to directly edit the registry for this task.

   See browsers41 for how to set up your default font to be one that displays the Esperanto characters.

   The problem with using iso 8859-3, is when you add the

   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-3">
   to the head of your HTML documents, Internet Explorer ignores your style sheets.
6. Install Unicode fonts (which handles any language, even Greek, Arabic and Chinese, but not available in Windows 98) fonts and use them in your style sheets Encode your documents with UTF-8
   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-81">
   And use UTF-8 multibyte binary encodings. You will need a Unicode-aware editor to do this.
7. Install Unicode fonts (which handles any language, even Greek, Arabic and Chinese, but not available in Windows 98) fonts and use them in your style sheets. Encode your documents with Latin-1:
   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
   And use Unicode entities such as ĉ &#265; to encode your accented characters. This is my personal preferred technique.

Without EspType or its equivalent, it is very hard to get Esperanto-accented characters. You can hold down the ALT key and type in a numeric code using the numeric keypad: ALTdown+1+9+8+ALTup will insert an accented C character.

So I like to use the Unicode entity encodings, technique (7). As I said, they are a bitch to manually encode.

Testing Your Browser : Provado De Via Retumilo

To understand just what I typed to get those effects, do a view source of this document. Note that part of the magic is the esperanto style, in the style sheet mindprod.css43 which enourages the use of an esperanto font.

Creating Esperanto HTML Documents : Kreado de Esperantlingvaj HTML-dokumentoj

Web pages written in Esperanto that use the native accents (ISO 8859-3) will have the following statement embedded in the HTML header:

Unfortunately, there is a bug in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5, and if you do include that metatag, all css, cascading style sheet, formatting fails. You could ask everyone to use the Opera44 browser, but you are unlikely to persuade many to abandon the Microsoft juggernaut.

For Unicode, the charset would be: Unicode, UnicodeBig, UnicodeBigUnmarked, UnicodeLittle, UnicodeLittleUnmarked or UTF8. See encoding45 in the Java glossary for more details. You would need a Unicode-capable editor to create such a document. I don't know of one. Unicode46 uses a cast of 64 thousand potential characters including Chinese, Tibetan, Thai, and of course Esperanto. The common letters can be represented in 8 bits, but the rest require 16.

HTML documents may use statements such as this to force specific Esperanto fonts:

<font face="Arial Eo">

You can also use CSS style sheet to automatically put Esperanto text into one of the Esperanto fonts, as is done here. They may directly use high ASCII characters for the accents (e.g. æ) or their low ASCII equivalents e.g. (&230;). Using high ASCII is more compact, less work and easier to proofread, but it won't work in as many browsers as the low ASCII method. Here as a Funduc Search and Replace47 script you can download48. It will convert high ASCII into its &230; form. If it shows on your screen as text rather than downloading, not to worry, just cut and paste it to a file called esperanto.srs.

You can use the script on the raw text before you add any other HTML codes, or after it is complete. You need to download the utility and the script separately. This script does not handle cx, or c^ conventions, but it would be trivial to add them to the script. I did not add them because I am writing about the conventions and I don't want all of the cx's converted. Instead, I turn ESPType on an off depending on which I intend, then use the script when I am done just to convert the ones done in high ASCII.

Acquiring Esperanto Fonts : Akirado de Esperantaj Tiparoj

Adobe Type Manager50 is great for temporarily installing just the fonts you need for a particular task. That way you can rapidly hide or reveal your Esperanto fonts. If you have more than the fonts you need active, there are two drawbacks:

1. Each font takes up RAM, so your computer slows down.
2. Unwanted fonts clog your menus making it harder to select the one you want.

If you have a Adobe Type Manager51, you can also use PostScript Fonts in Windows or NT. To install the fonts use ADD FONTS in Adobe Type Manager or the Control Panel under Fonts.

Most Esperanto fonts end in the letters "Eo" or "Euro", e.g. "Arial Eo" or "San Serif SudEuro" You need different fonts for iMac and Windows (TrueType). Sources of fonts include:

• Random Software's EspType52 program.It the click of a button it will find, download and install over 100 TrueType fonts for you automatically.
• ELNA53 provides some fonts. These may tend to be more widespread and hence safe to use in your web pages than others.
• Esperanto.org54.
• The Belgian Esperanto Society55 provides fonts for Windows, Mac and even the Amiga. These are the fonts ELNA recommends for viewing its pages.
• Sil.org56
• Ask AltaVista57 to search for "Esperanto fonts".

The Alphabet : La Alfabeto

There are accented c g h j s u. There is no q, w, x or y in native Esperanto words. Letters are usually pronounced as follows: a, ba, co, cxo, da, e, fo, ga gxa, ha, hxo, i, jo, jxa, ko, lo, mo, na, o, po, ra, so, sxo, to, u, uxo, va, za, with q=kuo, x=ikso, w=duobla vo y=ipsilono.

Warning: Accented characters may not display properly if your browser is not configured.

The Sixteen Rules of Esperanto Grammar Dek Ses Reguloj

	recommend book⇒Esperanto Dictionary
	0-8442-3764-7
	J.C. Wells
Amazon.com58 Amazon.ca59 Powell’s60 Amazon.co.uk61 Barnes & Noble62 Amazon.de63 Chapters Indigo64

1. There is no indefinite article; there is only one definite article, la, which is invariable.
2. Nouns (substantives) are formed by adding o to the root. To form the plural, j is added. There are two cases, nominative (subject) and accusative (direct object); the accusative is formed by adding n to the nominative. Equivalents of other cases are formed by the use of prepositions (e.g. de mia patro my father's).
3. Adjectives are formed by adding a to the root. They agree in case and number with the noun they qualify, forming plural and accusative in the same way. The comparative is formed by the word pli the superlative by plej. "Than" is rendered by ol.
4. The basic cardinal numerals (e.g. one, two, three), which do not vary for case, are unu, du, tri, kvar, kvin, ses, sep, ok, naux, dek, cent, mil. Tens and hundreds are formed by simple junction of the numerals, e.g. 583 = kvincent okdek tri. Ordinals (e.g. first, second, third) are formed by the addition of a, e.g. 4th = kvara. Multiples (e.g. dozen), fractions (e.g. one half) and collective numerals (e.g. foursome) are formed by the use of the suffixes -obl-, -on-, and -op- respectively. Distributives (e.g. two by two) are expressed with the help of the preposition po. Adverbials add e, e.g. firstly = unue.
5. The personal pronouns are mi, vi, li, sxi, gxi, si, ni, ili, oni (I, you, he, she, it, self, we, they, one). Possessive pronouns are formed by adding a to these. Declension as for nouns.
6. Verbs do not vary for person or number.
7. Adverbs are formed by adding e to the root; comparison as for adjectives.
8. All prepositions govern the nominative.
9. Every word is pronounced as it is spelt.
10. The accent is on the last syllable but one.
11. Compound words are formed by simple junction of roots (the chief word coming at the end). Grammatical endings count for this purpose as separate words [i.e. morphemesJ.
12. There is no multiple negation: if a clause contains another negative word it needs no lie.
13. To show motion towards, words take the accusative ending.
14. Each preposition has a definite fixed meaning; but if the sense does not indicate which should be used, recourse may be had to the preposition i.e., which has no meaning of its own. Alternatively, the accusative without a preposition may be used.
15. The so-called foreign words, which the majority of languages have taken from one source, undergo no change in the International Language beyond conforming to its orthography. Derivatives, however, are preferably formed from one basic root according to the rules of Esperanto.
16. The a of the definite article and the final o of nouns may be dropped and replaced by an apostrophe.

Prefixes : Prefiksoj

Suffixes : Sufiksoj

Correlatives : Korelativoj

Short Words : Vortetoj

Colours : Koloroj

Esperanto Computer Terminology : Komputika Vortareto

Punctuation : Interpunkcioj

Tenses : Verbotempoj

For nouns to describe ongoing actions, you can use the suffix -ad, e.g. amado for loving. The term for sexual lover comes from a slightly different root amoranto. For more precise tenses, consult this table:

Irregularities : Neregulajxoj

• The pronouns don't follow the -j plural rule. we is ni not mij. Similarly the plural of li is ili.
• There are masculine, feminine and neuter singular pronouns, li, sxi, gxi but they all collapse onto one plural form ili.
• The active present participle is indicated with -ant-, the passive present participle with -at-. Usually -n indicates a direct object, the passive receiver of an action. In participles, the convention is reversed.
• There is a genitive case (possessive) but only for the correlatives, e.g. ties. For nouns and pronouns you use the pronoun de. my aunt's pen becomes la plumo de mia onklino or you can also concoct adjectives, e.g. la onklina plumo.
• Esperanto is exceedingly clear on the matter of tenses. There are nine possibilities for describing the time of an event. The imperative is used both to command and to suggest that one ought to do something. The conditional is completely vague as to the time of the condition and the consequence. I find it odd on one hand you can't say a sentence in Esperanto without specifying the precise tense, yet when you speak conditionally, you don't give any hint as to when.

Esperanto Conference : Esperanta Kongreso

That's me third from the right. You might mistakenly think that most attendees would be novices like yourself. Not so. As you might guess from the average age in the photo above, most of the people attending are are already fluent and come to gab about every topic under the sun in a motley assortment of Esperanto accents. A conference is Esperanto immersion, not an Esperanto course.

Why Has Esperanto Failed : Malavantagxoj

In a Time Magazine interview, Nicholas Negroponte wrote that by 2004 the developing world will represent more than 50% of the Web. By 2007, the most widely used language on the Internet will be Chinese.

I talked with Chinese and Korean speakers. One pointed out that the Esperanto roots which are primarily from Latin and Slavic languages are meaningless to Asian speakers. The regular pattern helps, but the language is still much more difficult to learn than it is for English speakers. Korean word order puts the subject at the end of a sentence. Esperanto's flexibility in word order makes the language sound more natural to a Korean. Pronunciation is a major hurdle. Korean has no r sound. The Korean l is like the English l crossed with one quarter r. Koreans have great trouble pronouncing and distinguishing the letters f and p. Esperanto rolled r is difficult even for English speakers, and Esperanto makes great use of both f and p. It is quite a bit simpler than most natural languages, but it is still not universally pronounceable.

Esperanto is difficult for Korean and Chinese speakers with its pedantic grammar and fanatical tenses. A successful international language may have to be much more like Chinese than the current attempts, where tenses are handled as needed with adverbs. The international language of the future may well be Mandarin. We may need an interim pidgin Mandarin to get us over the hump until the world becomes fully bilingual.

Here are the reasons I think Esperanto has so far failed to catch on as the language for people of different nations to communicate:

• It is too international. The roots come from all kinds of languages. There are not enough cognates for English speakers. To catch on it must primarily be easy to learn for English speakers. The roots should come primarily from English so that English speakers can read it at sight, even if they can't speak or write it. Non-English speakers could treat the international language as training wheels, an easy step toward learning standard English. Esperanto could evolve by adding some more English-based roots. Non-English speakers should be able to leverage knowledge of Esperanto to help them learn English and vice versa.
• The accented letters are a PITA65. They are hard remember, hard to type, hard to read, hard to print and hard to deal with in computers. My Esperanto spelling mistakes are usually forgetting an accent or adding one that should not be there. Accented letters require high quality typesetting. They just look like smudges on low resolution screen displays. j and j^ look too much alike. Letters should be completely distinct even at a casual glance. See my Proofreader Font Student Project66 for my thought on why even unaccented alphabets lack sufficient clarity.

  In sorting, accents add the confusion as to how they should be collated: mixed with unaccented, after the corresponding accented letter or after all the unaccented letters. Accents have unnecessarily slowed the acceptance of Esperanto through the mechanical typewriter age. Computers are only just beginning to handle accents with any fluency. They still throw novices for a loop, installing special fonts, keyboard drivers etc. A true international language should not have any accented letters. It should be writable in 7-bit ASCII. If you use Esperanto fonts, MS word for example will show all its paragraph markers as an accented h. Esperanto is a mess with so many different conventions to handle the accents. English-oriented search engines cannot cope with the accents or the multiplicity of accent-kludging schemes. Standardising on the trailing x convention would fix that. Eventually, as the world moves to Unicode, Esperanto with accents will come out in the wash. However, by then Esperanto will have missed its window of opportunity. The interanationalist community communicates via the world wide web and email. Esperanto accents have blocked the easy spread of Esperanto to both those media. Computer companies have not co-operated in the least to provide proper Esperanto support.

• Esperanto was designed to be unambiguous. Unfortunately this goal conflicts somewhat with making it easy to learn. The brilliant clarity and regularity of the tenses and the correlatives make for unambiguous prose. The system of prefixes and suffixes cuts down on the number of root words you must memorise. Though the language is considerably simpler than a natural language it still has many complications I consider unnecessary. Let me enumerate:
  1. The grammar is a little on the prissy side, requiring both -n (nominative/accusative) and -j (singular/plural) agreement in both nouns and adjectives. English gets away with neither. Chinese gets away without even having plural nouns. Requiring agreement is quite unnatural for English speakers, though granted it comes naturally to speakers of Russian, German, Latin, Greek and Korean. Zamenhof did this primarily to allow flexible word order for writing poetry. It also permits word order agnosticism so that people can express themselves in the word order they find most comfortable.
  2. You must memorise the part of speech of every root word in order to be able to use it properly. This is almost as bad as assigning arbitrary genders to every word. Let me give an example. Comb and brush are very closely related in English, but in Esperanto the root for comb is a verb, kombi, and the root for brush is a noun, brosso. Look at the lack of parallelism generated from this lunacy:

     kombi = to comb	kombilo = a comb	kombo = a combing
     brosi = to brush	broso = a brush	brosado = a brushing

     And there is yet a third pattern when the root was considered to be an adjective.
  3. In English you can use a many verbs either transitively or intransitively, e.g he boiled the water, or the water boiled. In the interests of precision, all Esperanto verbs are either transitive or intransitive, never both. You can make a transitive verb intransitive with the igx suffix or a intransitive verb transitive with the ig suffix, as if it mattered to anyone but a grammarian. The catch is you must memorise whether each root verb is transitive or intransitive. Zamenhof's decision appears to be quite arbitrary. You may not just mindlessly tack on an ig suffix on an already transitive root or the igx suffix on an already intransitive root. Tacking ig onto an already transitive root means to cause someone or something to perform the action of the verb. e.g. Mi mangxis la pomon. I ate the apple. Mi mangxigis al mia cxevalo la pomon. I fed the apple to my horse. If you tack igx onto an already intransitive root, it means action that began just at that time. Mi pensis. I thought. Mi pensigxis. I began to think. The need for memorising the transitivity of every verb root is one massive headache with very little payback in added clarity.
  4. Esperanto is even pickier than English about the use of adverbs vs adjectives. English is gradually dropping the adverb. I wonder if the distinction in really all that necessary.
  5. I question the necessity of a special conditional tense. Esperanto dropped the subjunctive. It would even more clear without the conditional because you could more easily specify the time frames in your clauses.
  6. Esperanto has bizarre uses for the accusative case. Instead of simply saying "la muso kuris al sub la lito" you must say "la muso kuris sub la liton", where the accusative indicates the mouse was running toward the underside of the bed, not just running around under the bed. The accusative indicates motion toward, a quite artificial use of this case.
• Dorky dated image, akin to Technocracy. People make jokes about Esperantists. Jokes poke fun of the religious fervor, the extreme optimism and the desire to be different for the sake of being different. Esperanto desperately needs some PR to make it more mainstream. People will learn Esperanto, no matter what it takes, once I can convince them it will help them to get laid, make money or some other base motive. Altruism does not sell. We need x-rated Esperanto chat rooms. The Talking Dirty67 section of this essay is aimed in that direction.
• You can't use it for travel. There is no city or country on earth you can go where nearly everyone speaks Esperanto. If even one tiny country made such a push as a bid to attract Esperanto tourists, it might catch on globally. It might start with a single Club Med type resort.
• Esperanto was designed before the age of computers. For computer voice recognition, it would be better if the ts sound had to be unabiguously either c or ts. Further, the 'ej' sound is not distinct enough from the 'e' sound. It would have been better if 'e' were prounounced as a short e as in 'met' so the two sounds could more easily be distinguished.
• Historically the elite have often seen Esperanto as a threat. Ullrich Lin's La dangxera lingvo was published in Russia and in Germany. It tells about prohibition of Esperanto, imprisonment, concentration camps, executions and the Gulag Archipelago. Today, fear of being considered eccentric rather than fear of imprisonment puts people off learning Esperanto.

I have already been accused of being a heretic and a Interlinguist in sheep's clothing. I know almost nothing about Interlingua other than I was able to make sense of a passage of it without any background in the language. It is on my to-do list for future investigation.

I don't suggest starting over. That would mean another 100 years to get back to the same point. What I suggest is a gradual evolution toward simplifying the language further still.

Another possibility is formally defining Esperanto Comencanta, with relaxed grammatical rules, e.g. optional -n -j, -a and -e considered equivalent etc. Then beginners could blast away unselfconsciously knowing they are not making thousands of glaring errors. They could gradually pick up the fine points, by osmosis, communicating with full language speakers. The intimidation factor -- fear of making a fool of yourself in public is underrated as a prime block to the spread of Esperanto. It is one of the main reasons adults have trouble learning new languages. The thought of communicating aurally with another Esperanto speaker terrifies me. I attempted it at the kongresso, and was so humiliated, I lost all further interest in the language.

If it is to replace English, ironically it must be seen as a stepping stone to learning English. That would provides the carrot to learn Esperanto. If everyone goes through Esperanto on the way to learning English, many will stick at Esperanto, and all will know Esperanto. To make it a true stepping stone, it needs a new set of English based roots.

The Competition : Rivaloj

• Interlingua68 is another international language competing with Esperanto. It is not as popular, but it is easier for English speakers to read because all its roots come from English, French, Spanish or Italian.
• Ido69, reformed Esperanto that gets rid of the -j and -n agreement and accented letters.
• Novial70, yet another experiment in creating an international language.
• Trashing Esperanto71: an erudite exploration of Esperanto's weaknesses. Perhaps it is time to have a second crack at designing an even simpler, easier language.

Mandarin

1. There are already 1071 million people who read it, more than any other language. There is a wealth of new material published daily in it.
2. Korean and Japanese speakers are already familiar with much of the written vocabulary, though not the pronunciation.
3. You can display a lot more information in a small amount of display screen space.
4. Though it takes considerable skill and memorisation to learn to type, once you learn, you can type many more words per minute than you can English.
5. The grammar is simple. There are no tenses, no plurals, no genders. Usually prepositions are implied.
6. Much like Esperanto, you can combine simple roots to form more complex ideas . Even within glyphs there are patterns of strokes that can hint at meaning. E.g. the water radical indicates that word has something to do with water.
7. Numbers (cardinals and ordinals), days of the week and months of the year follow the same numeric pattern, even more regular than Esperanto.
8. The written form has been used to unify the various Asian languages for centuries. It has been field-tested for millennia.
9. There are places in almost every city of the world where you can find people using Mandarin (or the Cantonese dialect) in their daily lives.

1. For English speakers and speakers of other European languages, there are no cognates. You must start from square one.
2. Mandarin uses four tones, pitch inflections unlike anything in English. These are hard for Europeans to master.
3. You must memorise every Mandarin glyph separately, and memorise the pronunciation. The language is not phonetic. Every word is a separate pictogram. This is a major memorisation chore for an adult.
4. Because the language is made of pictograms instead of letters, you need a much more complicated system of keyboarding. There are many different schemes in use. All require considerably more memorisation than QWERTY typing. Oddly, one typing scheme for Mandarin would work by having you type the roughly equivalent English word. That could save you quite a bit of memorisation.
5. Mandarin is not a particularly good language for scientific discourse. It is hard to be extremely precise and unambiguous. It is a more poetic language where much common sense is presumed of the listener to fill in the details. Every glyph has many different meanings. You have to decide from context which one is meant.
6. Converting computer programs to use Mandarin is quite a bit more complicated than converting them to use French or Esperanto. You need at least 16-bit characters. This would mean converting huge amounts of C++ software to Java.
7. It comes already attached to one particular culture and world view. Some people consider it dishonourable or unmanly to learn another culture's language. They should learn yours, as an act of fealty to acknowledge the superiority of your culture.

Translation : Traduko

Mi amas æiajn belajn junajn virojn. or La du reøinoj estas en la banujo.

or, if you don't know how to keyboard the accents:

Mi amas cxiajn belajn junajn virojn. or La du regxinoj estas en la banujo.

Other Translators : Aliaj Tradukiloj

• Utwente EN->EO. Click here to translate an individual English word to Esperanto72.
• Utwente EO->EN. Click here to translate an individual Esperanto word to English73.
• Esperanto Tradukilo Vortope74. I have written a word for word translator that goes in both directions English <=> Esperanto. It works by looking up words in various web dictionaries. Because of Java security restrictions, it does not work in a browser, you must download75 it.

Books : Libroj

• 	recommend book⇒Comprehensive English/Esperanto Dictionary
  	0-939785-02-1
  	Peter Benson
  Amazon.com76 Amazon.ca77 Powell’s78 Amazon.co.uk79 Barnes & Noble80 Amazon.de81 Chapters Indigo82

  The Comprehensive English/Esperanto Dictionary is a nice fat dictionary, but it goes only in one direction, from English to Esperanto. It has some sexual terms and computer terminology.

• 	recommend book⇒Esperanto Dictionary
  	0-8442-3764-7
  	J. C. Wells
  J. C. Wells' classic compact book It contains a concise explanation of Esperanto grammar. Professor Wells has a home page83.
  Amazon.com84 Amazon.ca85 Powell’s86 Amazon.co.uk87 Barnes & Noble88 Amazon.de89 Chapters Indigo90

On-line Dictionaries : Retpagxaj Vortaroj

• Technical Dictionary91. Available in Unicode, Latin-1 and Latin-3 with or without accents! You can download it or use it on-line.
• Basic 2500 Esperanto words92
• Dictionary of Computer and Mathematical Terminology93, in plain ASCII.
• The usual dictionaries won't give you the sexual vocabulary94 you will need but this one will. See also the Talking Dirty95 section of this essay.
• YourDictionary.com96 an index of on-line dictionaries in over 200 languages, even Klingon, Romulan, Vulcan and Tolkien.
• Utwente EN->EO. Click here to translate an individual English word to Esperanto97.
• Utwente EO->EN. Click here to translate an individual Esperanto word to English98.

Links : Ligoj

• Esperanto la Internacia Lingvo99: Esperanto the International Language. Traditionally considered. The central page for access to material in and about Esperanto. A complete collection of links to other Esperanto pages.
• Esperanto.org100.
• ELNA101 the Esperanto League for North America.
• Esperanto Canada102.
• You can learn pronunciation103 on the Internet via AU sound files. Requires RealPlayer104 or equivalent AU player. You can download105 the basic RealPlayer free.
• Esperanto Tradukilo Vortope106. I have written a crude word for word translator that goes in both directions English <=> Esperanto. It works by looking up words in various web dictionaries.
• PMEG107 (Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko) A full handbook of Esperanto grammar.
• Don Harlow's Links108 Links to lots of Esperanto chats and computer stuff.
• John Well's essay on HTML109 in Esperanto. This is the John C. Wells, the one who put out the vinyl pronunciation record back in the sixties and compiled the Esperanto Dictionary. Have fun poking around his whole site.
• For a pot pourri of Esperanto information and web sites check out the Esperanto Web Ring110.
• International Hospitality Service Using Esperanto111.
• Adresaro de Rete Atingeblaj Esperantistoj112: Address list of Esperantists, both organisations and individuals, who can be reached on-line.
• La Flavaj Pagxoj de Esperanto113: The Esperanto Yellow Pages
• Virtuala Esperanto-Biblioteko114: The Virtual Esperanto Library.
• League of Gay Esperantists115.
• Try some Esperanto Newsgroups:
  • fido7.esperanto116
  • alt.talk.esperanto117
  • alt.esperanto.amuzo.varia118
  • alt.esperanto.komencanto119
  • alt.esperanto.konfig120
  • alt.esperanto.sci.varia121
  • alt.uu.lang.esperanto122
  • alt.uu.lang.esperanto.misc123
  • soc.culture.esperanto124
• Best Links125 advertised pruned to la crème de la crème. Includes on-line courses, grammars, dictionaries, newspapers etc.
• You can ask any search engine126 to look for elsxutu the Esperanto word for download to find Esperanto software.
• EsperScript127: a keyboarding scheme for Esperanto with shortcuts for the accented letters and common endings.
• Learn To Count128 in Esperanto and dozens of other languages. This Java Applet will convert any number into words.
•  Opera129 is a very fast web browser. The makers are eager to find volunteers to translate it into many languages. This would be a great way to introduce people to Esperanto.
• Esperanto Grammar Checker. I have not found one yet. It would analyse your sentences, displaying them graphically as a labeled tree, warning you of missing -n -j, or other grammatical errors.

130 Rings : Ringoj

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