Jes, Mi Lernas Esperanton - Yes, I'm Learning Esperanto
Tue, Aug 31, 2010
This post was originally posted on Babelhut.
Consider this an admission of guilt. I am learning Esperanto . Esperanto has both its critics and proponents in the language learning community, which initially bothered me. Nobody has criticized me for wanting to learn Spanish, nor has anyone (including myself) felt the need to defend that desire. I expect that the same would be true if I suddenly decided to learn German, Hindi, Arabic, or Navajo. Yet, for some reason, Esperanto draws in critics and defenders. This has kept me from posting about it here, but now I’ve decided that my decisions don’t need to be defended, and criticisms are easily ignored.
Esperanto Support Plugin for Anki
Thu, Aug 5, 2010
So I decided to learn Esperanto, which as an avid user of the SRS application Anki, meant I needed to either enter Esperanto’s special characters (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ) into my flash cards, which can’t easily be typed with the US International keyboard layout, or I could deal with the ugly “x method” workaround (cx, gx, hx, jx, sx, ux). At first, I was only creating Esperanto cards from my Linux computers at home, which let me use an Esperanto keyboard layout to type in the special characters. Pretty soon though, I found myself creating cards from my Windows machine at work during breaks. There is no Esperanto keyboard layout in Windows by default, so I tried to install some third party keyboard layouts without success. I eventually came across a program called Ek, which seemed to do the job of letting me type special characters, except in Anki where it would only type “ĉ”. So I just dealt with the “x method” and was typing words like vojagxas instead of vojaĝas. I don’t know why, but after a while all the x’s began to really bother me. I didn’t want to see mangxi in my flash cards, it just doesn’t seem as natural as manĝi does. So I did what any other software developer would do….