Resources¶
A curated list of places to learn Esperanto, look words up, and find text to test the library against. The entries are grouped by purpose; the ones marked in-repo ship with this project.
Courses¶
For learning the language from scratch:
- lernu.net — a free multilingual site with structured courses, grammar explanations and a dictionary. The most common starting point.
- Duolingo — Esperanto — a free, gamified course, good for building a daily habit and basic vocabulary.
- Kurso de Esperanto — a classic downloadable audio-visual course.
Because the grammar is so regular, most learners reach basic reading fluency far faster than with a natural language — which is convenient when your goal is to verify a linguistic library rather than to become a poet.
Books¶
Reference grammars and readers:
- A Complete Grammar of Esperanto, Ivy Kellerman Reed (1910) — in-repo
at
resources/esperanto/books/esperanto_grammar.txt. A public-domain, systematic grammar with graded exercises; it is the reference this section's Grammar page follows. Also available as Project Gutenberg eBook #7787. - Fundamento de Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof (1905) — the official, unchangeable foundation of the language (the sixteen rules, the Universala Vortaro and model exercises). The ultimate authority on what is correct Esperanto.
- Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko (PMEG) — a modern, exhaustive descriptive grammar in Esperanto, available free at bertilow.com/pmeg. The best deep reference once you read Esperanto comfortably.
Dictionaries¶
For looking up roots, affixes and meanings:
- Reta Vortaro (ReVo) — a free, community-built monolingual dictionary with translations into many languages, and downloadable in machine-readable form.
- Plena Ilustrita Vortaro (PIV) — the large monolingual dictionary of reference, published by SAT; the standard for authoritative definitions.
- Vortaro.net — a convenient online front-end to PIV.
- esperanto12.net — a compact reference for the closed classes, and the clearest walk-through of the correlative table — the 45 words the lexicon deliberately does not store.
Machine-readable is what you want
For feeding the library, prefer sources that offer a structured export
(ReVo's data files, word lists) over prose dictionaries. They can be
converted into the JSON format described in
resources/README.md.
Corpora¶
Bodies of real Esperanto text, useful for measuring word frequencies and for testing the tokenizer and lemmatizer on genuine input:
- Tekstaro de Esperanto — a searchable corpus of Esperanto texts (literature, periodicals, the Fundamento), the standard source for frequency data.
- Esperanto Wikipedia — a large, freely downloadable body of contemporary text across many topics.
- Project Gutenberg — Esperanto — public-domain books in Esperanto, including the grammar shipped in this repo.
Check the licence before redistributing text
A corpus is fine to analyse, but redistributing its text (for example, committing it into the repository) is only safe when its licence allows it. Public-domain sources like Project Gutenberg and the Fundamento are the safe default; Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA and must keep its attribution.
Communities¶
Where the language is actually used, if you want to see it in the wild:
- Universala Esperanto-Asocio (UEA) — the main international organisation, with links to national associations and events.
- Esperanto on Reddit — an active, beginner-friendly English-language community.
- Pasporta Servo, local clubs and the annual Universala Kongreso — the offline community, for those who want to hear it spoken.