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Speakers of English who have studied a little French or Spanish can start reading simple texts in Esperanto at once if those texts are written in such a way as to take advantage of the common knowledge that most English speakers already have. This is because a great many Esperanto words are similar to English words that have the same or nearly the same meaning. Such words are telefono, elefanto, prezidento and aktoro. Others resemble very basic words common to most Romance languages.
The following texts take advantage of these factors. The meaning of words that are not obviously like English words (viro, ĉu, edzino) can be made clear by the context in which they are presented. Of course, if worst comes to worst, a reader can always look up a word in a dictionary, but that should be rarely necessary.
The advantage of using this method is that the reader is not constantly shifting back and forth from English to Esperanto. The whole experience of reading these texts is in Esperanto. This helps develop, as it were, an Esperanto section of the brain.
Of course, there are many other words in Esperanto which are not similar to English words. An example is the word tuj (pronounced like the English word "too" with a y-sound at the end) which means at once, immediately. Other examples are morgaŭ (tomorrow), nepre (without fail) and edzino (wife). Many of these can be made clear by the use of context.
This material is not, of course, meant to be a resource for mastering Esperanto. It is intended to be used by those who want to experience what it is like to read simple texts in Esperanto and as supplementary material for students who have learned a little Esperanto.
A wonderful resource for learning Esperanto is lernu.net. In the upper right hand corner of this web page is a dictionary tool (Vortaro) that you can click on and enter a word in Esperanto to get its meaning in English (or, if you prefer, in some other language).
At lernu.net the student can take courses and learn how to pronounce the sounds of the language. One nice feature of Esperanto is that it is a phonetic language. Each letter has only one sound, so once you learn how to pronounce a letter you know you will always pronounce it the same way. Lernu is a free service.
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