Golden retrievers are amazing . <| sep |> I can give you my personal testimony and hope it makes a difference . First of all , I speak Esperanto fluently . It ' s not my best acquired language but I ' d say it ' s my second best . Note I learned it through Duolingo first I really enjoy it The language fascinated me I actually continue to use it The community is greatYou can take pride in knowing a unique languagephenomenon . Not everyone speaks a constructed language . You can be one of those daring futurists . There ' s something in it for everyone . It ' s plain fun . It helps you socialize . It is seriously educational . Now , more about me . I studied Spanish in high school , Arabic in college , and Persian in university . Persian is where my expertise lies I ' m fluent in it , live in a Persianspeaking country , and am married to a Persian speaker . I have dabbled in a bunch of other languages . I ' m taking Hindi classes now , and last year I finished getting a certification in Turkish . I live in a place where Russian is a very commonly spoken language , so I know it relatively well for someone who doesn ' t really know it . That is to say , I don ' t study or learn it , I ' m just forced to live with it . At home I studied Polish a bit . All the languages I ' ve dabbled in are too many to list . Circa 2009 I developed a strong enduring interest in linguistics , not simply learning languages , but the science of linguistics itself . I ' ve maintained this hobby throughout my studies , and I also teach languages professionally primarily English . I try to open up my students to linguistic ideas beyond simply learning a single language . I was a skeptic too . I really didn ' t take Esperanto seriously ever until the Duolingo course came out , and then I was like , Oh well let me just see what it ' s really like . After finishing a few skills on Duolingo , my passing curiosity turned into , Holy shit what is this ? and I need to figure out these correlatives . You can look at what I ' m talking about and . Chances are , Esperanto is not what you think it is . It ' s not at all like Romance languages even though it pretends to be one . It ' s much more like Slavic languages . Esperanto offers a lot of things to a lot of different people . It makes the linguist in me happy . It makes the polyglot in me happy . It makes the humanist in me happy , the historian , etc , etc . Hands down one of my favorite languages . It ' s true you can learn it quickly but it still takes time and dedication to master because it is a real language with lots of nuance . Some people treat Esperanto like , Oh I ' ll just write English sentences and then replace all the words with Esperanto translations . Lots of people write nonsensical garbage that way . In fact , not that many people know the language extremely well , but thousands and thousands of people communicate just fine in it , and it ' s not that hard to find really experienced and knowledgeable people . Just look for them . Furthermore , most of the criticisms of Esperanto are either baseless nonsense or things that are sort of not really true . In my experience , the only criticisms of Esperanto that I ' ve found to be valid involve deeper discussions about it ' s grammar and lexicon . The broadgeneral criticisms are easy to refute .