Dutch
The House of Oojah Learn to Speak Dutch Audio Books
  • Esperanto
    Esperanto is the most widely spoken artificial language. The name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book of Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887. The word esperanto means 'one who hopes'. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding. Esperanto has a very regular structure. Words are often made from many other roots, and in this way the number of words which one must memorise is made much smaller. The language is phonetic, and the rules of pronunciation are very simple, so that everyone knows how to pronounce a written worde and vice-versa.Esperanto has had continuous usage by a community estimated at between 100,000 and 2 million speakers for over a century. By most estimates, there are approximately a thousand native speakers. No country has adopted the language officially. Today, Esperanto is employed in world travel, correspondence, cultural exchange, conventions, literature, language instruction, television (Internacia Televido), and radio broadcasting. Esperanto is also a language of internet websites, which can be explored from the Esperanto interface of Google Search.
  • About the Spanish Language
    Spanish (español ) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language originally from the northern area of Spain. From there, its use gradually spread inside the Kingdom of Castile, where it evolved and eventually became the principal language of the government and trade. It was later taken to Africa, the Americas and Asia Pacific when they were brought under Spanish colonial rule between the 15th and 19th centuries. Today, it is one of the official languages of Spain, most Latin American countries and Equatorial Guinea. In total, 21 nations use Spanish as their primary language. Spanish is also one of six official languages of the United Nations. The language is spoken by between 322 and 400 million people natively, making Spanish the most spoken Romance language and possibly the second most spoken language by number of native speakers. Mexico has the world's largest Spanish-speaking population. Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the United States and by far the most popular studied foreign language in U.S. schools and universities. Spanish is among the most popular foreign languages for study in the rest of the nations of the Anglosphere in general, where on top of the widespread use of English globally, the large number of additional countries and geographic territory that Spanish allows exploring is an attractive prospect for many people. Due to proximity, linguistic similarities, and trade reasons it is also a very popular second language in France, Italy, Portugal, and particularly the southern states of Brazil. It is estimated that the combined total of native and non-native Spanish speakers is approximately 500 million, likely making it the fourth most spoken language by total number of speakers. Global internet usage statistics for 2007 show Spanish as the third most commonly used language on the internet, after English and Chinese. Spaniards tend to call this language español (Spanish) when contrasting it with languages of other states, such as French and English, but call it castellano (Castilian), that is, the language of the Castile region, when contrasting it with other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. This reasoning also holds true for the language's preferred name in some Hispanic American countries. In this manner, the Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the official language of the whole Spanish State