Thanks to Darcy and Meryl, we’ve once again got a functioning Esperanto group in Champaign-Urbana!
There are several komencantoj, but also three or four of us who speak Esperanto adequately, so we’re trying to do a mix of things at the meetings. We’ve been reading Gerda Malaperis, which is something that even beginners can do. We also started watching Mazi, which is fun. We’ve decided to all read a couple of articles from the Esperanto Wikipedia and show up ready to discuss them. We’re hoping that narrowing the topic of conversation down to a specific article will make it easier for people who’s working vocabulary is still really small–they can look up a few domain-specific words before the meeting (even make notes to refer to, if necessary).
I’ve already noticed improvements in my own Esperanto, after just three meetings–it’s amazing how fast you can pick up fluency if you’ll just practice.
Here’s the folks who were at the last meeting: