Doktoro Esperanto
99% Invisible

Doktoro Esperanto

B2Upper-intermediateOctober 27, 202635 min
  • Documentary
  • Language learning

Esperanto is what linguists call a “constructed language.” It isn’t attached to a nation or a region, and it didn’t evolve from another language over time. Instead, nearly 150 years ago, someone decided to sit down and design the whole thing from scratch. That someone was L. L. Zamenhof, also known as Doktoro Esperanto. He created this language with the hope that it would unite the world under one shared tongue. Today, reporter Katie Thornton tells the story of Doktoro Esperanto’s dream, and what we can all still learn from Esperanto right now. Subscribe...

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I'm Roman Mars, and I'm here today with a friend of the show

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  • C13:33
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B2

B2 · Upper-intermediate

Comfortable if you already follow TV news

A1 36%A2 37%B1 19%B2 6%C1 2%
  • 92% of the words are B1 or easier.
  • 166 words a minute: natural, fairly fast speech.
  • 172 harder words (B2 and up) in the whole episode.

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0:00

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars, and I'm here today with a friend of the show and frequent 99-PI contributor, Katie Thornton. Hey, Katie, what do you have for us today?

0:10

Hey, Roman. So a while back, I was on this show talking about shortwave radio. Unlike FM or AM radio, shortwave signals

0:19

are those ones that can travel thousands of miles. Yeah, you could be sitting in your place in Minnesota and like hear a broadcast in Spanish from South America or something with shortwave.

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