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What is a hobby you enjoy, but seems too quirky or obscure to bring up in most conversations? (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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Mine would be creating pen and paper ciphers for my made up secret communication needs.

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[–] 43 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (10 children)

I speak Esperanto and I am quite active in the movement and write for the Esperanto Wikipedia. In 2011 I had quite a cool trip to an Esperanto Youth Congress in Kijiv. But it's hard to talk about it because most people see it as a failed project from the early 1900s, not as a modern subculture.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    That's interesting! A few friends of mine and I tried to get a hold of it during the last school year. But we were greatly annoyed that there was no good free/open source resource in our language. Everything that could be good material was basically "Pay for the course" or just buy the book for 50€. That demotivated us quite a bit. I get why you would like to make a buck for your work and yes learning languages in groups is more fun but besides badly formatted vocab sheets there was no resource that was a proper introduction to the language.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago

    That's not an issue anymore. There is an Duolingo course, tons of Anki vocabulary decks, the app Drops supports Esperanto and the website lernu.net has a pretty good free course to learn Esperanto grammar.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    I couldn't find the name of the story. 99% sure the author is Howard Waldrop. In WW1 a group of soldiers sneak into No Man's Land and create an underground nation where all men speak Esperanto.

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