Nils - 3rd gen native Esperanto speaker

Some people don’t believe that native Esperanto speakers exist. Would you then believe that I’ve found a third generation native Esperanto speaker?! Nils Martin Klünder’s great-grandfather learned Esperanto, taught it natively to his kids, who taught it natively to his kids, who taught it natively to Nils… awesome! It seems that it’s now becoming a tradition in this blog to interview another native Esperanto speaker every year. Last year, I interviewed an Esperanto DJ: DJ Leo Sakaguchi. The year before was second generation native speaker Rolf Fantom. Anyway, without further ado, let’s see what Nils has to say! (He answered my questions in Esperanto, so you will find my translation in italics under his answers.)

How did you come to be a third generation native Esperanto speaker?

Mi naskiĝis tielmaniere. Miaj gepatroj instruis ĝin denaske al mi, kaj mia patro estis ankaŭ denaska. Parte certe ankaŭ estis kialo ke miaj gepatroj renkontiĝis per Esperanto, ekzemple mia patrino estis Polino.

I was born that way. My parents taught me it growing up, and my father was also a native speaker. This was certainly also partly since my parents met through Esperanto, for example my mother was Polish.

Nils's great-grandfather

How did your great-grandfather first learn Esperanto and why? When was that?

Laŭ mia scio, li lernis la lingvon en 1908 por pli bone scii kaj klarigi kial ĝi malbonas. Evidentiĝis, ke ĝi fakte plaĉegis al li.

As far as I know, he learned the language in 1908 to better know and explain why it’s bad. Later, he realized that he actually really liked it.

How has speaking Esperanto with your family from birth had an effect on you? Have you felt it more as a hindrance or something that improved your understanding of languages in general or something else entirely?

Nu, kompreneble mankas al mi komparo al ne-denaske-esperanta vivo. Tamen ĝi absolute ne ĝenis, kaj ofte estis agrabla kiel „sekreta“ lingvo. Malfacilas priskribi tion, sed ĝi estis parto de la familio kaj ielmaniere sentis „agrable“.

Well, I can’t compare that to what my life would’ve been like as a non-native Esperanto speaker, of course. However, it wasn’t annoying at all, and often it was nice to have a “secret” language. It’s difficult to describe, but it was part of the family and somehow always felt “nice.”

I often hear of native speakers not joining the worldwide community. What convinced you to become active in the movement?

Certe ne estis idealismo. Kiel multaj denaskaj Esperantistoj, mi ne kaptis la idealismon pri Esperanto kiel internacia lingvo. Estas normala afero por mi. Mi estas aktivulo ĉar mi alkutimiĝis al la renkontiĝoj, havas amikojn tie kiujn mi ŝatas revidi, kaj simple ŝatas organizi aferojn. Mi havas emon envolviĝi en renkontiĝoj, tiel ne nur estas pri Esperanto.

It’s certainly not idealism. Like many native Esperanto speakers, I didn’t catch the idealism about Esperanto as an international language. It’s a normal thing for me. I’m active, because I got used to the meetings, I have friends there who I’d like to see again, and just like to organize stuff. I like to get involved in organizing events, so it’s not just about Esperanto.

How do you use Esperanto in your daily life?

Momente nur malofte, ĉar mi intertempe loĝas sole. Kompreneble mi havas amikojn, kun kiuj mi nur povas mesaĝi esperantlingve kaj ankaŭ faras tion. Tamen en mia ĉiutaga vivo Esperanto ne aperas, krom pro mia ofta preparado por projektoj por venontaj Esperanto-renkontiĝoj.

At the moment just rarely, because I live alone now. Of course, I have friends I can only write in Esperanto and so I do that. However, in my everyday life, Esperanto doesn’t make an appearance, except due to my frequent project preparations for upcoming Esperanto meetings.

Do you think you’ll continue the tradition and raise your kids in Esperanto? Why or why not?

Por mi tio ne estas tradicio. Mi ne fiere festas la Klünder-klanon se mi parolas Esperanton. Tamen estas tre verŝajne, ke mi faros tion – simple ĉar estas „normala“ por mi kaj malfacilos eviti ke miaj infanoj lernas Esperanton.

For me, that’s not a tradition. I don’t proudly celebrate the Klünder clan if I speak Esperanto. However, it’s very likely that I’ll do that – just because it’s “normal” for me and it will be difficult to keep my kids from learning Esperanto.

Multan dankon for your answers! If you have any questions for Nils, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Ĝusta Klavaro for iPhone

Last night, I was enjoying watching Apple’s Keynote about their exciting, upcoming products, including the new design and features in their upcoming iOS 7 operating system (the operating system that powers the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch). On the language side, it will even come with Dutch, Italian and Korean dictionaries as well as a Chinese-English bilingual dictionary.

I applaud Apple for continuing to add more language support to iOS. However, I receive and send a lot of emails in Esperanto. In addition to this, I often comment and post in social networks too. Unfortunately, this is not possible natively on my iPhone or iPad. However, I was happy one day to discover the app Ĝusta Klavaro.

Now, when I need to type something in Esperanto, I just run Ĝusta Klavaro and then cut and paste the text to where I need it. Despite the fact that I’d rather have a real Esperanto keyboard on my iPhone, ĜK provides the best solution I could imagine, since it’s not yet possible to type Esperanto characters on any standard iOS keyboard. Within the app, you are provided with an empty text field and below the usual touchscreen keyboard with an additional line of letters: ĈĜĤĴŜŬ ĉĝĥĵŝŭ.

iPad with physical keyboard

The app also disables autocorrect as you type, since Esperanto words aren’t in any default iOS dictionary. Another nice touch is that when you connect a Bluetooth keyboard, it is smart enough to recognize this and just add the special Esperanto keys to the bottom of the screen as you can see by the picture on the right.

I’m really hoping that Apple will add Esperanto keyboard support in iOS 7. I’d just like to see the characters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and ŭ on the touchscreen keyboard when holding down a letter as it already works for other characters like ö, ż, ū, etc. Since Esperanto speakers speak a wide variety of languages, it would be most useful to have such support on every system keyboard.

There is quite a lot of demand for this within the Esperanto community, since the app has been downloaded over 4,500 times. In any case, I really hope to see Esperanto input support on the next version of iOS! Just curious, how do you type Esperanto characters on your system?

Now, I don’t blame her; many people think this way. People can’t conceive that it’s possible to speak freely in such a language. At the time, I didn’t have a very good answer for her. Later it struck me. How artificial is speaking into a microphone and having someone in a special chamber translate your speech into another language, which then plays back on headphones to your listeners? Is this more artificial than speaking a planned language?

I remember my first experience speaking a “neutral” foreign language with someone who didn’t speak English. I was staying at a youth hostel in a shared 6-person room in Orlando and was surprised to find someone in my bed. So, I said, “Excuse me, you’re in my bed.” to which he replied something I couldn’t understand. So, I tried out my high school Spanish: “Estás en mi cama.” (You’re in my bed.) He immediately understood and moved to another bed. The next morning, I learned that he’s Brazilian, so his native language is Portuguese. I found it strange that this whole time we’re speaking in a language with all these exceptions, which require extra mental effort to conjugate verbs, etc, when we could be speaking an easier language, which was more logical. It’s amazing to note that I had these thoughts years before I heard about Esperanto!

The more I travel, the more this situation comes up. As a Russian woman recently asked me, “What’s the most spoken language in the world?” to which she answered, “Bad English.” And it’s true. People all over the world struggle speaking with each other in English, which has all kinds of crazy exceptions, which make it harder to focus on the content, rather than whether they should be saying “drank” or “drunk.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The funny thing is that most people don’t realize what they really want. If you asked someone in the late 1800s, how they’d like to get around better, they’d say they wanted a faster horse! However, when I bought a car, no one objected to my purchase by saying, “What? That artificial horse?!” Now people in most parts of the world would consider you crazy if you bought a “natural” horse to get around town.

People see language as being one of the defining qualities that makes us human. But really, languages are tools for communication. Claude Piron touches on this well in his article: Psychological Reactions to Esperanto. In any case, I’m just as happy to speak an “artificial” language as I am to live in an artificial cave (apartment), fly in an artificial bird (airplane), or look at an artificial window (TV)… so in these cases, “artificial” could also mean “improved.” And after all that, I must say that I still feel pretty human!

Brian Kwong and other polyglots

Greetings from Budapest! This weekend I attended the Polyglot Conference here. There were people in attendance from all over the world, giving lectures on such varied topics as Learning endangered languages through music to How conflict management works in bilingual situations. There were also an introduction to Esperanto by Eva Fitzelová and the non-profit organization E@I by Zsófia Pataki.

As those who speak Esperanto know, many of its speakers also speak many other languages. We even have an inside joke that “Esperanto speakers are people who need Esperanto the least!” Back to the conference, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that thirteen(!) of the hundred participants speak Esperanto. These include some big names from the polyglot community such as Richard Simcott of Speaking Fluently and Judith Meyer of LearnLangs, Benny Lewis of Fluent in Three Months.

Zsófia Pataki speaks about E@I

Benny has even written Just 2 weeks learning Esperanto can get you months ahead in your target language, which I’d recommend sending to those critical of Esperanto’s usefulness. His basic argument is that, counterintuitively, by spending two weeks learning Esperanto, you can get miles ahead in the language you want, because it teaches you how to learn a language very quickly. I also learned of a Budapest language school, which starts each beginner course with a quick overview of Esperanto grammar to accelerate each student’s progress in their language of choice.

Besides that, Susanna Zaraysky is currently working on a documentary of how foreign language knowledge has saved peoples’ lives. She is focusing on the Ladino language (a 500-year-old dialect of Spanish) and tells a story of a Jew from Sarajevo who escaped from a Nazi train and managed to talk with and Italian colonel with Ladino with the colonel replying in Italian. We also learned of how George Soros escaped from Hungary by attending an Esperanto conference abroad. If you know of others whose language skills have saved their life, Susanna would like to hear from you!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Anthony Lauder of Fluent Czech explained the differences between how newbies try to learn languages and how polyglots learn them. He also explained how to learn 9 languages as you can see from the picture below! Basically, newbies work too hard on vocabulary instead of moving on to real native materials in their target language as quickly as possible. They want to look up every unfamiliar word in a dictionary rather than trying to guess them and move on, later comparing guesses based on their context.

Anthony Lauder's steps to polyglottery

If you’ve already been studying Esperanto for a little while, I’d highly recommend moving on to reading a real book like Fajron Sentas Mi Interne or Karlo… but you could also listen to podcasts like Verda Radio. If you’re a bit further along, I’d recommend starting to read Esperanto literature or even the 24 hour Internet radio station Muzaiko. To reach fluency faster, he also recommended the quick read How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately.

In any case, if you ever get a chance to attend a Polyglot Conference, definitely jump on the opportunity! It’s such an amazing and open community, and an excellent chance to practice all those languages you never get around to speaking. Even if you only speak two languages, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of interesting people and talks there. The next Polyglot Conferences are planned to be held in October 2014 in Montreal and New York City, so I hope to see you there!

Picture of Zsófia Pataki taken by Eva Fitzelová, used with permission. Picture of Andrew Lauder taken by Alex Rawlings, used with permission.

Update: Benny Lewis and Alex Rawlings just published their own interesting blog posts, so check them out to experience the conference from other angles!

Later that year, I discovered Wikipedia in its very early stages and started the Esperanto version, which played a major role in the growth of the multi-lingual Wikipedia… for example, helping to start the Czech Wikipedia. For more details about this, you can read my blog post here: Finding the Esperanto Wikipedia (Part 1 of 4).

So, even before learning Esperanto, I was already planning to take a 1-month backpacking trip through Europe, but I found this free hospitality network called Pasporta Servo and I met Amanda Higley Schmidt who had travelled through Europe for 16 months and I thought, if she could travel alone backpacking through Europe, I definitely could too, which encouraged me to follow this dream!

On my trip, I was staying at the apartment of two board members of the World Esperanto Youth Organization, who asked if I would like to be the organization’s next volunteer in Rotterdam for a year. I took them up on that opportunity and after six months of backpacking in Brazil and Europe, I ended up working, speaking in Esperanto for a year, since it was the only language the staff had in common.

While I was there, I got accepted to a 3-week intensive French course held by the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and later through an Esperanto contact helped me take part for free in a one-week intensive French course (normally costing 2700€) in the Netherlands, this time by one of the top French instructors in Europe.

When my volunteer time was up, I worked for the Calgary Esperanto Center in Canada for a few months. A while later, I was travelling to Frankfurt for the first Wikipedia conference and after I got home, I found a job offer to work as a wiki researcher in Heilbronn. Then I moved from New York City to Germany, mostly because of my reputation as the Esperanto Wikipedia Founder.

Chillin' at the Esperanto Go Club in Tokyo

Toward the end of my work there, the Tokyo Esperanto Club asked me if I would like to come visit, all expenses paid, for ten days and give a lecture about the Esperanto Wikipedia. Would I? Oh yes! To this day, that was one of the best trips of my life. I also lectured at a few universities there, which professors translated into Japanese for the local students.

After I returned, my contract at the university ran out, and I got a job working at a social network in Berlin, due to meeting an investor in the company at an Esperanto New Years conference. Since then I’ve moved on to iPhone development, and now also work on the side as the Esperanto blogger for Transparent Language.

As I write this from my home in Berlin, I remember the countries I’ve visited because of Esperanto: Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Japan, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and Ukraine. After staying in Taipei for a conference, I ended up staying with an Azerbaijani Esperanto speaker in the small city of Pingtung. The thing is, while these experiences sound incredible to people who don’t speak Esperanto, they are quite normal, but still awesome, for those who speak it well and use it to travel.

How has Esperanto changed your life? Feel free to comment below, read others’ experiences on Quora and add your experiences there.