1. Ĉu vi lernas ĝin?
Ĉu vi lernas ĝin? asks my green-and-white T-shirt with the Esperanto
insignia. “Are you learning it?”
Apart from online learning, to study Esperanto in the United
States is not a simple matter. Aside from a few classes taught in
university towns or major cities, courses are few and far between,
but this was not always the case; in the 1950s, seven towns in New
Jersey alone offered weekly classes. Since 1970, however, the
foremost course in the country has been the North American Summer
Esperanto Institute, or NASK, which also happens to be the most
intensive Esperanto immersion course in the world. Residing for
three decades at San Francisco State University, it moved for a few
years to Vermont, then to the University of California at San Diego,
where I enrolled for the three-week program. (Since then, to boost
enrollment, NASK has been scaled back to eight days; enrollment
skyrocketed.)
I signed up for the intermediate level and started to prepare by
studying on my own. On Amazon I found a hardcover book,
published in the 1980s, called Esperanto: Learning and Using the
International Language. It’s a ten-lesson program written by an
American, David Richardson, for Americans—people who live in
New York and drive cross-country to California, who measure out
their lives in miles, pounds, and dollars. The dialogues feature a
bumbling father, part absent-minded professor, part Homer
Simpson; a bossy, know-it-all mother; two eye-rolling teenagers. No
one has time for Dad’s endearing foibles, everyone talks over
everyone else, the kids leave the table before dinner is over—a
typical American family. Except that around the dinner table they
speak Esperanto.
In search of a more interactive method of learning, I clicked on a
few links from the Esperanto-USA homepage and arrived at the
bright green, user-friendly website called lernu! (“learn!”; lernu.net).
A section of the site is designed specifically for English speakers,
English being one of forty-odd languages made available by the
“lernu! team.” A variety of online courses are available, at various
levels, the most famous of which is Gerda Malaperis (Gerda
Disappeared), a mystery novel scientifically designed by Claude
Piron to teach words in descending order of frequency. But the audio
of Gerda was dauntingly rapid, so I opted for a basic course called
Mi estas komencanto (I am a beginner). Lesson one got off to a nice,
slow start: Kio estas via nomo? (What is your name?); De kie vi estas?
(Where are you from?). The next couple of lessons enabled me to
ask if someone were a student and if not, what “labor” he or she did;
whether that person had come on a bus or a train; and to confess
that I was nervous. I wasn’t—until lesson six, when it emerged that
the course was designed to prepare me for an Esperanto congress.
Ĉu vi volas loĝi en amasloĝejo aŭ en ĉambro?
Kio estas amasloĝejo?
Amas-loĝ-ejo estas granda ejo kie multaj loĝas surplanke.
Do you want to stay in an amasloĝejo or in a room?
What’s an amasloĝejo?
Amas-loĝ-ejo is a big place where many people sleep on the floor.
It sounded like a youth hostel for Carmelites, but the point was to
show how Esperanto builds words from the ground up. Amas- is a
root meaning “mass”; loĝ-, a root meaning “stay” or “dwell”; and -
ejo, a suffix (or stand-alone word) meaning “a place where.” There
was also the issue of the ĉapeloj—diacritical marks called “hats” in
Esperanto. The Esperanto alphabet has twenty-eight letters, five of
which are c, g, h, j, and s wearing tiny “hats”—ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ—that alter
their pronunciation. The letter c is pronounced “ts,” but when
topped by a ĉapelo, it becomes “ch.” Also u, when preceded by a,
usually puts on a crescent to become ŭ.
Once I registered for lernu!, I immediately began receiving
emails, entirely in Esperanto, with the lernu! “word of the day.”
Most days, thanks to my experience with French and Italian, I could
decode the word easily: kurta, like the Italian corto, meant “short”;
trista (in French, triste) meant “sad”; tosto, of course, meant “toast”—
a champagne toast, not toaster toast, which is toasto (toe-AHS-toe).
The words I couldn’t spontaneously decode I had to interpret from
context: “ĈERKO: Kesto, en kiun oni metas la korpon de mortinto.”
Decoding: “ĈERKO: a chest in which one puts a dead body”—i.e., a
coffin. Then there was “PUM: Pum! la viro falis en la riveron.” “The
man falls in the river,” I managed, noting that pum could be
redoubled to evoke a nuisance. And with the ending -adoj, it could be
turned into a relentless, repetitive cacophony. Where Americans
hear “boom-boom-boom,” Esperantists hear pumpumadoj (poom-
poom-ah-doy).
With a modicum of Googling, I discovered an alternative to
lernu!: an online phrasebook designed for English-speaking
congress-goers with more than one type of congress in mind. Unlike
the wholesome, patient lernu!, where one repeated, repeated,
repeated, here things were said only once.
Mi ŝatas renkonti novajn homojn. (I like meeting new people.)
Mi ŝatas vin. (I like you.)
Mi amas vin. (I love you.)
At this point one chose one’s own adventure. For the amorous, there
was Mi volas vin (I want you), and Mi ne povas vivi sen vi (I can’t live
without you). And just in case, there was Mi estas graveda (I’m
pregnant) and Kiel vi povas fari tion al mi? (How could you do this to
me?). For the less venturesome, there was Mi sentas la mankon de vi
(I miss you) and Samideane (Regards—“used only for a fellow
Esperantist”). Knowing I was more likely to say amasloĝejo than
graveda, I returned to lernu!, and two weeks later, found that I was
capable of a halting reading—in Esperanto—of the NASK website.
2. Affixed
There are twenty-four students at NASK, ranging in age from
seventeen to eighty-two, plus the instructors, Greta, Benedikt, and
Wayne; Nell, an administrator; and an assistant with the unlikely
name of Slim Alizadeh, a thirtyish Iranian-American IT guy. Slim’s
role is various: he edits and produces the daily newsletter, solicits
presenters for the evening programs, and leads the optional
afternoon excursions—which begin today, Slim announces, with a
hike to the glisilejo. I can’t find it in my dictionary, so I try to decode
it: glisi, “to glide”; -ejo, “place.” A gliding place? A place for gliding?
Life at NASK often seems to be about finding opportunities to teach
affixes, and our afternoon excursion to the Torrey Pines Gliderport is
clearly one of them.
Assigned to suites in a dorm, we learn the difference between a
roommate (samĉambrano, “same-room member”) and a suitemate
(samĉambrarano, “member of the same cluster of rooms”). We’re
roughly grouped by gender and age. In my suite are three middle-
aged women and myself, while the seven or eight college students
room downstairs in suites whose doors are always propped open. All
the female students are science majors and all the male students are