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Takafumi_Y

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Esperanto, written in Chinese characters

#esperanto #linguistics #language #showdev

You can't read this sentence. In about three minutes, you will.

我 很 爱as 读i.

It isn't Chinese, and it isn't Japanese. It's a European language written in Chinese characters — something people have daydreamed about for a century, and something that is realistically possible, as this post will argue, for exactly one European language. If you've ever wanted to read a logographic script — to look at characters and see meaning — this is the fastest legitimate route I know of. Let me show you how it works, and then I'll tell you what it actually is.

The three-minute lesson

Here are nine characters. Each stands for one unit of meaning:

Character Meaning
我 I
我们 we
爱 love
读 read
书ˢ write
学 learn
能 can
和ᴷ and
很 very

And here is the entire grammar you need, written in small Latin letters after each character:

Ending Function
-o noun
-a adjective
-e adverb
-i infinitive ("to ~")
-as present tense
-is past tense
-on direct object

That's the lesson. Now read the sentence again:

我 很 爱as 读i.

我 (I) + 很 (very) + 爱 + -as (present tense) + 读 + -i (infinitive). I very much love to read. You just read a logographic sentence.

One more:

我们 能as 读i 和ᴷ 书ˢi.

We can read and write. You're now two-for-two in a writing system you'd never seen four minutes ago.

The reveal

The language is Esperanto — the 139-year-old constructed language with a living worldwide community, the one you can take official CEFR-aligned exams in (I passed B2 this summer).

Esperanto has a property no natural language has: every word decomposes, mechanically and without exceptions, into root + affixes + a grammatical ending. The roots carry meaning; the endings carry all the grammar. So you can swap each root for one Chinese character, leave the endings in Latin letters, and get a script that works exactly like Japanese kanji with okurigana — except the underlying language takes months to learn instead of a decade.

The name of the language itself demonstrates the system. Esperanto = esper (hope) + ant (one who is ~ing) + o (noun) — "the hoping one." In this script:

我 学as 望在on.
Mi lernas Esperanton. — I am learning Esperanto.

望 (hope) + 在 (one who is ~ing) + -on. The word "Esperanto" is written 望在o.

Why Esperanto — and why only Esperanto

People have daydreamed about writing European languages in Chinese characters for a century. It never gets past the daydream — because for it to actually work, three things have to line up at once, and Esperanto is the only European language where all three do.

1. The rules make it possible. To swap roots for characters, a program must find the roots — in every word, every time, unambiguously. English morphology forbids this: go/went/gone has no segmentable root, and the spelling hides what little structure there is. French, German, Russian all fail the same way. Esperanto's words decompose with complete regularity — lernejo is always lern (learn) + ej (place) + o (noun): a school. That total regularity is what makes a lossless, reversible character mapping mechanically possible at all.

2. The tools make it real. A character mapping that exists only on paper is a thought experiment. Here the entire chain is built, public, and running: a stable table of 10,000+ roots and ~50,000 compounds, a one-click bulk converter, ruby annotations, an IME, a reverter, and CI that verifies the round trip. You can convert any Esperanto text you like, today.

3. The learning cost makes it human. The classic road to reading characters runs through Japanese or Chinese — years of study before real text opens up. Esperanto takes months (~153 hours for the core curriculum). Among all the ways into logographic reading, this is the only one built on a European-type language whose entrance fee a busy adult can actually pay.

Remove any one of the three and the idea collapses back into a daydream. With Esperanto, all three hold — which is why this exists as working software and a daily writing habit, not a sketch.

What this actually is

I've spent three years (2023–2026) building this system: assigning characters to roots one by one with AI assistance and manual review, then building the tooling around it. This is a completed, working system, not a proposal or a sketch. The current state:

  • A master table of over 10,000 root entries and ~50,000 compound words — essentially complete and frozen. The root assignments went through three years of iterative refinement and are now stable. Every single assignment is public and searchable: root → character view · compound → character view.
  • Every one of the 2,270 characters used falls within Level 1 of China's official Common Standard Characters list (the 3,500 most common characters). No rare characters, no invented characters. The core vocabulary — everyday words, function words, all affixes, correlatives, numbers — uses about 1,600 characters, 93% of them a single character per root. There's an English gloss table of the core 2,756 roots (first-pass glosses, marked as draft) so you can browse what each root means without knowing any Japanese or Chinese.
  • One-click conversion of any text. This is the part to try first: paste any Esperanto text — your own writing, a lernu lesson, a Wikipedia article — into the converter and it comes back kanji-ized, in bulk, in one click. Optionally it prints each character's Esperanto reading in small type above the character — furigana in reverse — so you can read kanji-ized text from day one, before you've memorized a single character. The characters teach themselves while you read. Here's what that looks like:

The bulk converter's output, with the Esperanto reading printed above every character
"Saluton! Ĉu vi jam aŭdis, ke Esperanto estas internacia lingvo?…" — kanji-ized in one click, with ruby readings above each character.

  • An IME-style online editor: type bon and 良 pops up as a completion candidate, like a Japanese input method — for when you want to write in it directly.
  • Full reversibility, verified by CI. A one-click reverter turns any kanji-ized text back into standard Latin-alphabet Esperanto, deterministically. When several roots share a character, the most common root keeps the bare character and the others get a small superscript mark (hom = 人, person = 人ᴾ, oni = 人ᴼ), so the round trip never loses information. The kanji layer is a display mode, not a fork of the language.
  • I use it daily. I've been keeping my diary in kanji-ized Esperanto since June 2026 — on screen and by hand in a paper notebook. This is a writing system with a living writer, not a spec sheet. Here's a page from the notebook:

A page from my paper diary, handwritten in kanji-ized Esperanto
A page from my paper diary, written by hand. The tiny superscript letters you can see in the handwriting are the disambiguation marks — they're not just for computers.

Pronunciation never changes. The characters are for your eyes; the language stays Esperanto for your mouth and ears.

What this is not — read this before you get excited

This will not teach you Chinese or Japanese. You'll learn the core meaning of ~1,600 high-frequency characters — genuinely useful if you later study either language — but the grammar is Esperanto, the compounds are Esperanto compounds, and the readings are Esperanto readings. Anyone who tells you that you can absorb a real East Asian language by osmosis through characters alone is selling something.

This is a logographic script, not an "ideographic" one. Characters here map to morphemes of a spoken language, not to bare language-free ideas. If you've read John DeFrancis's The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy — the classic demolition of the "ideographic myth" — note that this project doesn't contradict it. Chinese characters have in fact been adapted to write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese for well over a millennium (see Zev Handel's Sinography for the definitive study). Esperanto is simply the first European-type language regular enough for the same move to be done losslessly, by a script.

This is not a reform of Esperanto. Not one word, sound, or rule of the language changes. English has Shavian and Deseret as alternative scripts; Esperanto has Braille and Morse standards; this sits on the same shelf. The Fundamento is untouched.

Who this is for

If you did Heisig. Remembering the Kanji teaches you the meaning of 2,200 characters — and then leaves you with nothing to read. This is the missing reading practice: real sentences, real diary entries, real books, where the character knowledge you built actually gets exercised, while the grammar costs you weeks instead of years.

If you're learning Japanese or Chinese and drowning in characters. Reading kanji-ized Esperanto is character flashcards with a plot: you meet 良, 学, 望, 人, 水, 星 over and over in meaningful sentences, and the meanings stick because they're doing work.

If you love writing systems. This is, as far as I know, the only fully-reversible logographic orthography ever completed for a constructed language at full-vocabulary scale. The entire mapping is open source. Kick the tires.

If you just love the characters themselves. Plenty of people wear or ink characters they can't read — there's a whole genre of websites laughing at the results. Here, every character's meaning is one click away, and you can verify it yourself. 望在o — "the hoping one" — is, I'd argue, a rather good thing to have on a T-shirt.

And the learning cost?

Esperanto is routinely estimated to take a fraction of the time of any national language — the grammar has sixteen rules and no exceptions. My own vocabulary-plus-example-sentence course clocks the full core curriculum at about 153 hours: an hour a day for five months, and you're reading. The character layer on top is optional at every step, and you can toggle it off with one click whenever you want the Latin text back.

Try it

The interface language of some pages is still Japanese/Chinese — more English versions are on the way; the English gloss table above is the first.

I'll leave you with a line from my actual diary — written the night before my Esperanto B2 listening exam:

我 愿as 做i 我an 最可on 也 明.
Mi volas fari mian plejeblon ankaŭ morgaŭ.
愿 (want) + 做 (do) + 最 (most) + 可 (able) + 也 (also) + 明 (tomorrow) —
"Tomorrow, again, I want to do the best I can."

I passed.

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