Introduction :
This course in the international language Esperanto is for English speaking students and is intended to permit a very high degree of competence as soon as possible (ASAP). If the reader wishes to follow an introductory course to permit him (or her) to gain some knowledge of the language then Ian Fantom's Esperanto Viva course is more suitable.
The title Esperanto A.S.A.P. (As Soon As Possible) is intended to indicate that this book is aimed at intelligent readers who are serious in their intent to gain a reasonable grasp of this language quickly and are, therefore, prepared to make a considerable effort on their part. No language, even Esperanto, is easy to learn! It is certainly not aimed, however, at linguists. The author is very much a non-linguist.
Using this book a working knowledge of written Esperanto should be rapidly achieved. (Spoken Esperanto is a different matter and cannot be learnt from a book. See Chapter Two for Advice on this important aspect of the language).
At the end of each chapter exercises are set, solutions are given in a special section. It is hoped eventually to give vocabularies (both English-Esperanto and Esperanto-English). In order to make new words clearer red print is used for Esperanto words and black for English. Also to help with the remembering of new words we shall refer to similar words in English (or sometimes other Western languages). The abbreviation used in this context are E: (English), F: (French), G: (German), S: (Spanish), I: (Italian), L: (Latin).
Accents in Esperanto:
One major problem for Esperanto on the Net is the accents used in Esperanto (supersignoj). It is not that computers cannot deal with them- I originally wrote this course in book form using a computer, the word processing software Lotus Word Pro and a modified font Verdana Eo. No- the problem is that the publisher and reader of items of the net must have their computers using the same system- and there are literally thousands of different possibilities. If one tries to read something written by another system one often gets just gibberish! It would be far better to omit accents altogether than produce illegible pages. Of course, one cannot blame Zamenhof as there were no computers when he published the language.!
I overcame the problem in the original web pages of this program by writing the accent separately e.g. ^c or ^G. However using Unicode it is now possible to write the pages so that (I think) any computer can read them and so I am (slowly) rewriting everything in this format.
If your computer can cope you should see the letters with correct accents i.e. ĉ instead of ^c, Ĝ instead of ^G. If you cannot read this correctly (perhaps no accents are visible) then you will have to use the original version. Send an e-mail to learn how this can be done to the author.
However back to the problems of the Internet! Six Esperanto letters carry accents- these are not just modified versions of the unaccented letters but separate letters in their own right. In an alphabetical listing the accented letter always follows the unaccented one. Notice that the U carries a hook whilst the others have circumflexes.
The full Esperanto alphabet is:
a b c ĉ d e f g ĝ h ĥ i j ĵ k l m n o p r s ŝ t u ŭ v z
Notice the lack of the 4 letters q w x and y.