At the moment there are quite a lot of articles in the newspapers about the need for Australians to learn at least one foreign language.

I do think that learning any foreign language has many benefits and therefore should be encouraged.

It even helps with English literacy as students who know a foreign language can often analyse English much better than other students.

Learning foreign languages certainly opens the mind and helps to understand other cultures.

Lots of different languages are spoken in the world, so which ones should we learn?

There is one language well worth considering, but many people seem to know very little about it, even though there is a lot of information about it on the Internet. It is called Esperanto. It was created about 120 years ago and is now used by up to two million people from more than 100 different countries.

Many people put learning a foreign language in the too hard basket and you can’t really blame them when it comes to have to learn all the irregularities of the French language, Japanese script, etc. Esperanto can be learnt much faster.

Furthermore it helps a lot with the learning of subsequent languages. Thanks to Esperanto children can send messages to other people in lots of different countries and therefore get to know many cultures and not just one like it would be the case if they choose to learn Japanese, for

example.

Thanks to the Internet it is now possible to study Esperanto at home using one of the online courses that come complete with sound like Vojagu kun Zam available for free at www.lernu.net

It seems to me that using Esperanto for international communication would promote a fairer world, in which all cultures and languages are respected and equal.

At the moment, for example, the American culture is being studied much more frequently than other equally worthwhile cultures.

Your readers would certainly enjoy reading about some of the features of the language that makes it easier to learn, for example you use “mal” in front of a word to make the opposite, so bela = beautiful, malbela = ugly, fermi = to close, malfermi = to open.

Another example use “ino” at the end of a word to make it female. Patro = father patrino = mother, kato = cat, katino = female cat, etc, etc.

Nicole Else

ASQUITH