The Esperanto Teacher
Helen Fryer
Read by LibriVox Volunteers
The international language Esperanto was first released to the world in 1887, when L. L. Zamenhof published his first book, "Dr. Esperanto's International Language". Since that time, many learning books have been developed to help the beginner attain a proficiency in the language. Helen Fryer's "Esperanto Teacher" is one of the earliest of these attempts in English. Divided into 45 short and easy lessons and supplemented with sections on joining words, exclamations, compound words, arrangement of words in a sentence, words used with the object, the 16 rules of grammar and list of common useful expressions, as well as a number of translated texts for the new Esperantist to practice his/her skills, this book contains everything one needs to gain a proficiency in the language. (8 hr 20 min)
Chapters
Reviews
Best as Read-and-Listen
SystemOfEleven
An okay book to listen to by itself, this works best as a read-along book. Several parts are simply not designed to be heard without the visual accompaniment (for example, the chapter which explains how to pronounce a word based on its spelling, and vice versa) or are confusing without being able to look at the layout on the written page (such as tables of related words, like where/there/here/etc). There are also exercise sections at the end of each chapter which may not be very useful in audio adaptation (such as "try to pronounce this list of random words" and the fairly large sections of untranslated text which are meant for the reader to use to test their understanding of the previous content). That being said, there are some sections which work even better with the audio accompaniment than by simply reading alone. I have to pause a lot during the exercises, but it's really nice to be able to hear the sentences I'm supposed to be translating as well as read them.
E
Some of the chapters read all of the Esperanto vocab words what they mean English all together instead of reading, one line of Esperanto and then one line of English. The book does a good job of explaining the grammar rules of Esperanto, and I learned a few things about English grammar as well. I would typically listen to a chapter more than once to understand it better and to practice the vocab words/phrases. Overall, I think this is a good resource for starting to learning Esperanto.
requires more adaptation
moist tissue
EN some parts are not well suited to understanding by listening, and must be better adapted for the audio version, such as providing translation every other sentence. some chapters have done this but others have not, this makes it harder to follow the languages meaning as its being used. however it seems to me to be a good and extensive explanation of the language, and hopefully i will be able to re-write this review in esperanto soon.