Esperanto Makes Learning Other Languages Easier
We’ve already seen that Esperanto is relatively easy to learn. That’s one selling point: There’s no need to be apprehensive about it being too hard.
There’s another excellent reason which may be of interest to people, even if you’ve no intention of mixing with other Esperantists or attending any events: Learning Esperanto makes it easier to become proficient in other languages.
There have been several studies over the decades which have looked at the positive influence of Esperanto on language-learning.
Consider this experiment, reported in 1965: A group of secondary school children were being taught French, and would be tested after four years.
Half of the group did four years of French. The other half studied Esperanto for the first year, and followed this with three years of French. The group which traded a year of French for one of Esperanto ended up with a “significantly better command of French”.
(Source: Williams, N. (1965) ‘A language teaching experiment’, Canadian Modern Language Review 22.1: 26-28)
An Irish chap called Benny runs the website Fluent In Three Months, and explains why he feels Esperanto is so effective, two months’ learning of which enabling the learner to jump months ahead.
The central point is that learning one’s first foreign language is harder than learning subsequent ones. Once one has “learned to learn”, things become easier. This being the case, it makes sense to learn the easiest language as the first one, and then move onto learning the first foreign natural language.