World Language Week 世界语

You can use English everywhere you go. If someone can't talk in English, they aren't worth talking to.

I work in Beijing and nobody is learning it.
It's more like a "meme" language because they are running out of ideas. Beinjingese like to teach odd stuff to their kids.
5 years ago they were crazy about billiard, every rich kid was learning how to play billiard.

>>1060174
They still play that in Hong Kong. But unlike Esperanto, only a few people actually bother learning it in some obscure universities.

>>1060016
This is what people with no passports or people who only travel for a week at time think.

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China knows that pat of US-Anglo power stems from their being the native speakers of the contemporary lingua franca. It's something which gives the US a lot of soft power, particularly when it comes down to media influence.

China also knows that Chinese will never be able to fill this role naturally. With its moon runes, it's relatively difficult to learn when compared with alphabet based languages. Given Esperanto's globalist/communist roots, this makes it appealing not only to the Chinese state, but also the various fringe leftists they're attempting to appeal to.

It's not a bad move, per se, but they should have started a while back. They should have pushed for an Esperanto-language internet, and used that Esper-net as a platform for foreign propaganda. More importantly it would have created a medium where the use of the language came naturally, and could become associated with truth and other grand ideas. Instead the internet speaks english and japanese.

Really anything they do now would be too little too late.

>>1060245
Fuck off. Every major countries teaches English, every educated person knows English. You can survive with just English anywhere.
Imagine if everyone was forced to learn Esperanto worldwide. It would be a Chinese Communist nightmare.

>>1060279
Anyone who denies this is pretty much in a happy la-la land.

>>1060279
And I believe your "major country" criteria is whether or not people know English, right?

Even seriously believing that "every educated person knows English" shows that you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about. I know plenty of people with whom you couldn't hold a conversation in English because they simply aren't proficient, and you'd actually miss on an opportunity to talk with great, intelligent people (who for some reason are able to express complex thoughts in their native language, weird). I'm not denying English is very important nowadays, but you're taking this fact to stupidly extreme proportions, and the only reason you think that way is precisely that you don't know anything outside of your English-speaking environment so it seems like it embraces the whole world to you. (I'm assuming you're a native English speaker, and if you're not it's just even sadder)

If travelling is for you nothing more than taking pictures of a few local sceneries and capital cities' monuments, then probably knowledge of English is enough to get around. Good luck on actually discovering the country and its culture though. I can't believe there are people on a travel board actively supporting not trying to diversify one's worldview...

>>1060526
Why do you hate English so much? I'm not going to learn the language of every country I can visit. My options would be much more limited. Esperanto will never spread.

>>1060252
it's kind of silly that they would choose esperanto though, a language exclusively based on european (romance with some slavic/germanic) vocab and grammar. They should have made one up that's more neutral

>>1060563
I don't hate English at all. I'm even glad I know it because of all the great people it allowed me talk with. What I can't stand though is this sort of monolingual almost imperialistic attitude, with "relevant English" on one side and "other useless languages" on the other. Also it's not true that English is mandatory in every place worthy of visit, it's not true that being educated equals to knowing English, and it's not true that it's enough for survival "anywhere". It's fine not knowing a language, but it's ridiculous to believe knowing it would be useless anyway.

As far as Esperanto itself goes, it has actually been spreading constantly since its invention, and still is doing so. There are currently more Esperanto than Icelandic speakers, and it's on par with some other small languages such as Slovenian for example. It's a huge success, being the only constructed language for now having native speakers, thanks to its ever-raising popularity spanning on numerous decades. Also, it has been proven to greatly help subsequent language learning, even when studying it for only a month or two, so were it not actually popular, it would still bear a huge didactic value.

And I haven't even bothered to learn it, I'm just being objective. The only reason Esperanto doesn't spread even quicker despite its easiness is precisely that people think it's doomed to failure. It's crazy how some seem to outright reject it though, as if it somehow is a bad thing that more and more people are picking it up. And so what if it actually ends up failing? It's not like it's that time-consuming anyway: it was designed not to be.