He lived in Russia in a neighborhood populated by ethnic Russians, Jews, Germans and Polish. Being discouraged by the confusion and lack of understanding with its resulting hostilities, he felt that a neutral language would bring peaceful co-existence within neighborhoods like the one he was raised in, and also among neighboring countries.

The most important aspect to Dr. Zamenhof's work, is that Esperanto does not belong to any particular country. It is no one's first language (although now there exists a few families where both parents speak Esperanto and have raised their children in a home where Esperanto is their first language!), so no one has any advantage over another. It's meant to be a second language, used to communicate with others regardless of their national origin or ethnicity.

Unlike "natural" languages, Esperanto has about 15 grammar rules, and is very regular in pronunciation and spelling. Each letter has one sound, and emphasis is always on the next to the last syllable.

All nouns end in the letter 'o', most adverbs end in 'e', and most adjectives end in 'a'.

Conjugations are relatively simple in Esperanto.

To conjugate, the endings are changed to 'as' for present tense, 'is' for past tense amd 'os' for future tense. The infinitive form of a verb ends in 'i'.

Therefore, the conjugations for 'to speak' are:

speaks now - parolas
spoke - parolis
will speak - parolos
to speak - paroli

Esperanto is based on Latin & Greek, and anyone who speaks one of the Romance languages such as Italian or Spanish, will notice quite a few similarities. It makes great use of prefixes and suffixes to change the meaning of words. For example, Patro means 'father'and Patrino means 'mother'. Gepatroj means 'parents' and Bopatroj means 'parents-in-law'.

An example of an Esperanto sentence:
La inteligenta persono lernas Esperanton.
In English: 'the intelligent person learns Esperanto'!

1- Unu
2- Du
3- Tri
4- Kvar
5- Kvin
6- Ses
7- Sep
8- Ok
9- Nau

10- Dek
11- Dek-Unu
12- Dek-Du
19- Dek-Nau

20- Dudek
21- Dudek-Unu
30- Tridek
90- Naudek

100- Cent

This is the symbol used by Esperantists to identify themselves as speakers of Esperanto. Banners, signs, T-Shirts and etc. are normally designed to show the Green Star on a white background.