Lumin wrote:On a scale of one to ten, about how hard is it to learn Esperanto? Is it anything like Spanish?
I'd give it a 2 - it's still involves studying, but it's about as easy as a language can get.
The vocabulary and sound is like Spanish, imho. The grammar is much easier however. For example, you only need 3 endings for the basic tenses:
-is for past tense
-as for present tense
-os for future tense
All verbs (without exception!) use these endings, they are used for every person (I, you, he/she/it, we, you, they) and you need not learn different types of tenses like past tense vs. perfect vs. remote past or simple present vs. continuous present.
If an Esperanto text does not appear obvious to you right now, it's probably because you're unfamiliar with basic endings like these. Also, there are suffixes that make Esperanto more difficult to understand for those who haven't studied the language but that make Esperanto much easier to learn for those who do. For example, imagine you want to say "glasses". In most languages, this involves learning a new word that has little or no relation to the words you learned before. In Esperanto however, you can get by with just knowing the basic verb "vidi"(to see) and the all-round suffix "-il-", which denotes a tool. You can call glasses "vidilo"(tool used to see).
If you'd like to learn Esperanto, you can consult
http://www.esperanto.net in order to find local Esperanto communities and courses. Or you can take advantage of free courses offered online, such as the great software offered at
http://www.cursodeesperanto.com.br or the FEC correspondence course offered at
http://pacujo.net/esperanto/course/. I learned Esperanto using the German version of the FEC, which gave me not only an excellent basis of practical Esperanto but also contact to other Esperanto speakers and the possibility to spend a weekend in Berlin with my tutor, who invited me for an intermediate course. I can see the advantages of the software course, too, though: you get to hear and speak Esperanto and the interactive games are a fun, too. The disadvantage of the software course is that you get few texts to work with and generally not as much vocabulary as in the FEC.