There's been a rash of English chauvinism flying around this week, from a biologist who gave a Ted Talk talking about English was going to be the one dominant language, to high school students mocking and being jerks about the Pledge of Allegiance recited in Arabic during a Foreign Languages Week. And a few more in between. There's always a lot of opinion about foreign languages in the United States, generally the ignorance of those is inversely proportional to the number of languages spoken or read by the one spouting it. I think some of them actually might count as a being able to speak less than one, their ignorance is so marked.
As it happens, I've been re-reading a book about the topic of language-ethnic chauvinism and how it can lead to violence and oppression. I'd like to post an excerpt but the book, Kroata Milita Noktlibro by the very fine Croat writer Spomenka Štimec is in Esperanto. That's the reason I got curious about jazz in Croatia last weekend. The book is her "night-journal" of life in the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. Perhaps I'll try my hand at translating from it sometime but I'm not very good at translating because I'm not that good at writing English. You could probably learn enough of the language to read the book before I could manage a translation I'd feel comfortable with posting. It is, by a long, long shot, the quickest and easiest language I've ever attempted and one which you can actually attain genuine fluency in within a year.
If you wanted to try, there are excellent resources online to learn the language. One of those is by a group which includes Spomenka Štimec who produced the "Zagreb Method" beginning with a very short textbook based on the most often used words based on a large study of recorded conversations by fluent speakers. From reports of classes using the text (the video shows a skit performed after the second class of one of those) it does, actually, give you more language fluency in 12 short lessons than you will get in any first year language course I ever took. I don't know if this source is exactly legal but it has sound recordings (not hi-fi but usable) of the short texts and links to further parts of the course. There are other places where you can find it in pdf form online but without the sound recording. If you work the course you can go on to other parts of it, including Štimec's quite fluent but easy reader, Esperanto ne Estas nur Lingvo and an adaptation of the James Fenimore Cooper story, The Bravo, La Sentimulo, which is an interesting choice but one you would have little trouble reading if you went through the lessons and the follow up reader.
Another popular path you could easily take after going through the Zagreb course is based on some easy books by the truly great master of simple language, the professional, United Nations, translator and psychoanalyst, the late Claude Piron. The novella Gerda Malaperis uses, if I remember correctly, fewer than 500 word roots, introduced gradually, but by the end the writing is so fluent you hardly notice that it is simple language. Some learners use it as a first text. There are lots and lots of sources for it online as a text (I think Piron released rights to it but I'm not sure). Here's one with the complete text and with a link to the vocabulary for each chapter. There are other sites with a more easily printable version. There is a pretty good sound recording of it being read, and a movie version that isn't too shabby either. There are a number of question-answer courses centered around it online. Piron also wrote a rather surreal companion book, mostly as series of flow of consciousness monologues using the same vocabulary, gradually introduced at the same rate, Lasu Min Paroli Plus, it's kind of wacky but has its own weird charm. He also wrote a follow up book, Ili Kaptis Elzan! which I haven't read. He was famous for his use of limited vocabulary to write entire books that are fluent in a way that nothing I ever saw written in Basic English or even the Special English of the Voice of America is. His own website gives a number of those, such as the book Vere au Fantasie, His website also provides audio files of some of those being read, including a few chapters from Lasu Min Paroli Plu.
Another resource you might be interested in is an old book by a Dr. Benson, his Universala Metodo. The first part of the book is a course based on simple illustrations. You might not want to depend on it to learn the basic language but it is a good supplement. Someone has read a number of those in a series of Youtubes, or you might want to copy and or print out the pages in pdf format from the Edmonton Esperanto Society website. The introductory course pages end on 92, followed by a reader. I think you could learn the language from it but it's a bit old fashioned. I don't think it has been turned into pdf's anywhere but the old Practical Course in Esperanto by Frenc Szilagy, also based on cartoons, is usable, if rather old fashioned, perhaps offensive in some of its c. 1930s humor.
There are lots of other basic Esperanto courses online, those from the site Lernu! are popular, though I've never looked at them closely. There are lots of other resources for reading, listening to and reading the language online. If you want more of a temptation for trying, you can watch the (in)famous pre- Star Trek performance of William Shatner in the actually kind of interesting, moody, and pretty weird period movie Incubus. The pronunciation isn't too bad and you can see he was, actually, a pretty good actor.
That should get you going, if you want to. If you want more suggestions, let me know.
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