Now it’s January 2012. Below I list my ten most popular posts of last year. I’m really excited about this, because it’s often hard to find time to read every post and we have new readers who don’t have time to dig through the archives for the gems. So, here we go…
Surprising to me, the most popular post of the year was not written by me, but rather by Amelie Ambrus. In this three part series, she expertly presents the landscape of Esperanto literature for your reading pleasure. Also see the other parts: Discover Esperanto Literature in English and Five Periods of Esperanto Literature.
I’d say the greatest success of the Esperanto movement this year has to be The Universal Language, by award-winning documentary filmmaker, Sam Green. In this film, he presents the history of Esperanto in the context of other important historic events. It’s quite interesting to see Esperanto presented in film with a neutral point of view. Also see my review of this documentary, Review of The Universal Language documentary as well as its original inspiration, Interview about Utopia in Four Movements.
Many were fascinated with Rolf Fantom’s account of how he was raised as a second generation native Esperanto speaker. He accounts on how he was raised, as well as the difficulties and blessings of growing up this way. I’ve also recently met a third generation native speaker, but you’ll hear more about him later this year.
It surprised me that this was so popular, but I guess it shouldn’t. People starting to learn Esperanto need easy texts to read. Enjoy the many diverse articles and stories there!
Somehow I think the title has something to do with this posts top placement. The film director of Cargo, a feature film raising awareness of sex trafficking, wanted a more international exposure of his message. This also had a lot to do with Xenia “Libera” Prilepskaja-Grubstein’s influence as a long-time Esperanto speaker to be sure this reached the audience it deserved.
It seems that 2011 was a breakthrough year for Esperanto in the world of film. Looking over this list, I see that 4 of the top 10 highlights are in some way related to movies. The first Esperanto Film Festival taking place in Brazil was a historical event, giving our community a unique opportunity to showcase our progress in this field.
An interesting chance to challenge yourself while comparing your results with your friends. You can choose which languages you want to start and/or improve. Collect points on the leaderboard based on your activities and how long you do them. The next six week challenge will begin in February!
While I was quite disappointed with the IJK in Kiev, others strongly disagreed with me. In fact, I considered JES to have been much better, but for example, Jessica Grasso actually preferred IJK! I guess that’s why we have so many different Esperanto events. In the future, I expect to see even more interesting Esperanto events.
I’m really glad this made the top ten. In this 4 part series, I tell the story of how I founded the Esperanto Wikipedia in December 2001 and helped it grow. For years, I’ve been meaning to retell this story and here I finally got around to it. The other three parts: Founding the Esperanto Wikipedia, Unicoding the Esperanto Wikipedia and Promoting the Esperanto Wikipedia. Out of everything from last year, I’m most proud of this series… a must-read! On a related note, you can also read about the first Esperanto Wikipedia conference.
Finishing off our list is that quirky 50’s style black-and-white film Attack of the Moon Zombies, dubbed into Esperanto. Also see my interview with one of the translators.
Which was your favorite post of the year? Lately I’ve had so much material, I don’t know what to do with it all. Subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for email updates (scroll up to the upper left part of this page) to make sure you are always the first to know what’s happening in the Esperanto world and I look forward to sharing what’s in store for us in 2012. Thanks for reading!
Comments:
Pauxleto:
Thanks for including Esperanto Documentary: The Universal Language in your Esperanto Highlights of 2011!!! Dankon!