Have you always wanted to learn Spanish (or another language), but felt too insecure or awkward to try? Maybe you’ve been told you don’t have an ear for languages, or you just don’t know how to dive in to the complex grammatical structures and alien vocabulary of a new language.
If any of this sounds familiar, you might consider taking a crash course in Esperanto before tackling the language you really want to learn. Esperanto is an invented language conceived by LL Zamenhof in the 1880s. Zamenhof intended Esperanto to be an international common language that would promote world peace and understanding. While he felt short of this goal, he did create a very simple and logical language that can be learned easily no matter what your native tongue might be.
What does Esperanto have to do with learning Spanish? Well, if you learn Esperanto first, you will get a huge confidence boost that should inspire you to finally follow through on your goal of learning Spanish. Esperanto has a simple phonetic spelling system, no noun genders, no crazy verb conjugations, and best of all many of its words come from the same roots as Spanish and other romance languages. It is so easy to learn, you can be communicating in as little as 2 weeks. Free course material is available at Lernu.net.
Remember, once you break the barrier of learning your first language, it won’t be so scary to continue on to more languages, even ones that seem impossible to you now.
Read more here: Why Should I Learn Esperanto? from Fluent in 3 Months, the funny and fascinating blog of Benny the Irish polyglot.