When hearing about Esperanto, many people initially have objections to it. However, most of the criticisms are unfounded, as you can read below. Find out for example why Esperanto is more suitable than English as an international language, how Esperanto is not Euro-centric, why it is as easy as it should be and how it promotes language diversity.

There are many languages that are dying and men create new languages.. wouldn't it be better to try to preserve already existing languages?

Incidentally, most Esperanto speakers are acutely aware of the need to preserve language diversity and believe that they are actually contributing towards it, because Esperanto doesn't aspire to replace local languages, unlike English, French, Spanish, Chinese, etc. that are promoted at the expense of local languages and have at times forbidden the use of local languages. Esperanto is supposed to become everybody's SECOND language, that is, a language that everybody learns in addition to his native tongue, and then people are encouraged to learn more foreign languages.

If you want to form an unbiased, informed opinion on how Esperanto's relates to language diversity, read the article Why Esperanto Suppresses Language Diversity and the rebuttal Why Esperanto Supports Cultural Diversity.

Esperanto didn't work out, did it? English is still the most international language.

Yes, right now a lot of people are learning English, just like they have been learning Latin, French and Russian before and might be learning Chinese in the future. The richest nations can push their languages like that and even charge big fees for teaching their languages. Esperanto is a volunteer effort; it doesn't have the big money to advertise nearly as much, so it's pretty much limited to the word of mouth and it will live and grow only due to its intrinsic qualities. Esperanto has already persisted for more than a hundred years, it has more speakers than minor national languages like e. g. Estonian and today it's in a better position than ever because the internet is multiplying the amount of people who will hear about it and who have the chance to learn it.

If mankind was able to put aside all the muscle-flexing about what languages get used as international languages e. g. for the EU's and UN's meetings, Esperanto would be the logical choice. It's neutral, not associated with any one country (which would make other countries start bickering, see France vs. English) and if the goal is for everybody to learn it as a foreign language, it's definitely the most suited, since it was developed for just that purpose.

English is simply too difficult. In China there are millions of people who are trying very hard to learn English. Many have studied English for more than 10 years and still can't speak it with any amount of fluency, the vast majority of Chinese people can just say "Hello" and "How are you?". It's not that different in Europe really. A recent study showed that the vast majority of Germans doesn't understand the English used in commercial slogans, even though everybody has to learn English for 6 or 9 years in High School and English is very close to German, making it one of the easiest languages for Germans to learn. Being able to communicate with people from foreign countries is really limited to the educated elites, especially when it comes to poorer countries. This is wrong.

Do we want to learn a language that is too simple? I partially like all the irregularities in Spanish or Italian...

You're a language geek ;-) . I'm very sure that the average Joe Blow prefers his language learning to be as painless as possible. Irregular verbs are a reason many people get discouraged from learning foreign languages, people don't normally enjoy them. However, Esperanto also has some features that language geeks will love, for example the affix system that allows you to express yourself very creatively even with a limited vocabulary.

Shouldn't we create an easier language than Esperanto, for example doing away with tenses, plural, the Accusative or prepositions?

While a language without tenses or plural will come naturally to a Chinese speaker, it will feel very alien to most everybody else. If you're used to being able to express tense and plural, it is probably harder to learn a language without these features than to learn the really simple rules Esperanto has on this subject. For example: the plural always ends in -j, the present tense always ends in -as, the future tense always in -os, the past tense always in -is (and there are no different kinds of past tenses that you'd have to choose from).

As for the Accusative: the word "Accusative" inspires fear in those who learned German, Latin or Slavic languages, but in Esperanto it's nothing to be afraid of. In Esperanto, the Accusative is always marked by the added -n - no matter whether you're talking singular nouns, plural nouns, adjectives or even personal pronouns. Not only do you not have to learn any declension patterns, you also don't have to learn several forms for each personal pronoun, such as English "he - him" but "she - her"(not "shim"). This feature of English is actually the Accusative in disguise. Also, since Esperanto lacks a Dative case, the decision whether or not to add -n is really just a matter of identifying whether the word is the object of the sentence or not.

Esperanto prepositions are relatively easy. Prepositions are an illogical part of every language, otherwise why is it "in the afternoon" but "at night", "in June" but "on Monday". All of them refer to a stretch of time. Plus, all languages divide their prepositions differently, so there are no patterns that Esperanto could follow. Hence, Zamenhof did the only sensible thing by taking whatever prepositions languages clearly defined (e. g. opting to take "sur" rather than "on" for the spatial relation, because "on" is also used for time in English whereas "sur" is unambiguous) and then applying the rule 'one preposition per context'. So there's one preposition that's only used for the means by which you do something, one preposition for something or somebody that accompanies you, and so on. There are rather more prepositions in Esperanto than in other languages because of this, but they are much more logical and it's easier to learn what is logical.

If you are in favour of creating an easier international language, also consider that developing enough maturity, a large user base and an own culture will take a long while, if not forever, and Esperanto already has all those things.

Why does Esperanto use 5 extra letters? English doesn't need any...

Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, wanted to have a 1 letter = 1 sound relationship, which would give learners the ability to correctly pronounce every new word they see written and to correctly write down every new word they hear, without any ambiguity. In English, the spelling is very ambiguous, because for example only context can tell whether /tu/ should be spelled "two", "to" or "too" and only experience can tell whether "ea" should be pronounced as in "bread", "meat", "beauty" or "heart". In Esperanto, one letter can only be pronounced in one way and one sound can only be spelled in one way. Zamenhof went all the way with that, even insisting that a common letter combination such as "sh", should be pronounced as the combination of the sounds of s and h. Hence the need for the letter ŝ to represent the "sh" sound. You'll find that this straight-forward spelling makes the learning so much easier.

Other than being easy, what advantages does Esperanto offer? Esperanto has about 2 million speakers, Hebrew about 4 million native speakers.

You can't really compare Esperanto to Hebrew or any language like that. Yes, Esperanto has comparatively few speakers (though there has never been a census and so the numbers cited range very widely between 100,000 and 10 million; most say a few million). However, the speakers are spread throughout the world. It's an advantage and a disadvantage: there is no country where you can be sure that the majority of people will understand you if you speak Esperanto (Brazil would probably come closest), but on the other hand you can find Esperanto speakers anywhere and they are ready to accept you into their homes and show you places regular tourists won't see, just because you speak Esperanto. If you want to visit Israel, learn Hebrew. If you want to visit Japan, learn Japanese. If you want to visit Brazil, learn Brazilian Portuguese. If you want to visit West Africa, learn a few dozen local languages. However, if you are interested in more than just one foreign country's culture, if you want to experience lots of cultures, Esperanto provides easy access.

Isn't Esperanto very Euro-centric? That's not fair to people elsewhere.

Actually, Esperanto's grammar is not Euro-centric and its simplicity and logic will be appreciated by everybody. Only the vocabulary is Euro-centric. And this is not a disadvantage but an advantage for everybody, because the majority of the world's population knows a European language: not just people in North and South America and Australia but also people in Africa typically speak at least one European language. In Asia there are not quite as many people as elsewhere, but learning European languages is still incredibly popular there. Also, Esperanto's vocabulary is so versatile that very few word stems actually have to be learned. For example, it's a common estimate that knowing 500 word roots are enough to express basically anything in Esperanto and most of the rest are just synonyms of words that could be created from those roots.

And what's the alternative? The fairest language would take word stems from every single language in the world. On a regular-sized vocabulary, that results in about 2 word stems per language and a lot of quarreling about which language really common words like "and" are taken from. Assuming that you have a chance to understand words from 10 languages due to languages you studied and cognates, that still results in a language whose vocabulary is 99% incomprehensible to you and everybody else.