BIALYSTOK, Poland Fans of Esperanto, the artificial language devised in the late 19th century Poland by Ludwik Zamenhof, say it's relatively fast and easy to learn, pronounce and use.

'The idea is that with 10 hours of Esperanto, you are perfectly able to read a text with a dictionary, because its 16 basic rules can be learned in that amount of time,' said Francois Randin. The 58-year-old Swiss photographer and film-maker started studying the 'artificial' tongue 15 years ago and now teaches courses online.

'After that, all you need to do is read regularly, say for about 10 minutes a day, and within a year you'll be able to get up and speak in public without notes,' he told AFP.

Paulo Ebermann, a 28-year-old German, agreed.

'My Esperanto after three months was about the same as my English after nine years,' he said.

Some 75 per cent of Esperanto's vocabulary comes from Latin and Romance languages, notably French, and around 20 per cent from Germanic tongues like German and English. The remainder is drawn from the Slavic languages Russian and Polish, while most of its scientific terms come from Greek.

And, to ease learning, the language is phonetic. Esperanto uses a modified Latin alphabet, every word is pronounced exactly as spelled, and there are no 'silent' letters or exceptions.

What makes Esperanto exceptionally easy, however, are its logical rules.

There are no complexities like grammatical gender.

There is only one verb conjugation — for example, 'paroli' means 'to speak,' 'mi parolas' means 'I speak,' and 'vi parolas,' 'you speak.' To form the past tense, the 'as' verb ending becomes 'is,' while the future is 'os.'

A prefix can be added to any word to change it to its opposite — the Esperanto for 'good' is 'bona,' while 'bad' is 'malbona.'

The language's flexible word order allows users to employ the structure of their native language and still speak Esperanto that sounds perfectly intelligible and grammatically correct to others.

The following are some basic Esperanto terms, with their English translations

Hello — Saluton
How are you? — Kiel vi?
Please — Bonvolu
I don't understand — Mi ne komprenas
I speak Esperanto — Mi parolas Esperanton
Please speak slower — Bonvolu paroli malpli rapide
Where are you from? — De kie vi estas?
What time is it? — Kioma horo estas?
I love you — Mi amas vin