Practical ability to think and communicate in other languages is a meaningful source of self-esteem and confidence for a child.
Primary Esperanto supports self-confidence both by offering a language which is attainable in the time available, and by having it offered by a constantly accessible teacher, empowered to adapt the program to suit the needs of the child.
Children make more visible progress in Esperanto than in other languages because Esperanto is more regular.
Educationally disadvantaged students are often very much encoraged to find that they can often spell and read in Esperanto, even if they cannot do so in English.
However, Esperanto is also a good choice for able students, because all languages have much more creative potential than most of their users have time or ability to exploit. A child who has already learned to conduct normal conversations in Esperanto can go on to write beautiful Haiku, describe a scientific investigation or compare cultural mores with pen-friends!
Young children naturally extrapolate from their language, creating plurals like “mouses”, odd pronunciations of unusually spelled words and incorrect verb forms. The same processes are more rewarding in Esperanto because words can be reliably created from word-parts of fixed meaning, to provide a broad vocabulary with minimumal rote-learning. This freedom encourages creativity, analysis and synthesis and encouragement for intellectual risk-taking!
