The Paderborn method is a proposed method for teaching foreign languages, originally conceived for children's education. It consists of first teaching a student a simple language (usually Esperanto) for two years, then teaching them a second language for several years after that. The time spent studying Esperanto helps the student acquire the second language more quickly, such that they end up more proficient in the second language than if they had spent the first two years studying it instead of Esperanto.

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The most comprehensive experiment on the Paderborn method was done by Prof. Helmar Frank, of the University of Paderborn's Institute of Pedagogic Cybernetics, from which the method gets its name.

The idea that Esperanto might prove helpful in acquiring foreign languages was posited in a 1922 report to the League of Nations. It was given as a potential reason for children to study Esperanto, but the only study that had been conducted at the time, an experiment in the Girls' Secondary School at Bishop Auckland, was inconclusive.^[1]

The educational benefits of Esperanto for children were subsequently studied by researchers at Columbia University,^[2] the University of Sheffield,^[3] and the Egerton Park Country Secondary School.^[4] Many of these experiments' findings were compromised by unclear objectives, brief or anecdotal reporting, and a lack of methodological rigor. However, they consistently suggested that the study of Esperanto provides advantages to primary-age children that the study of natural languages does not.^{[5]: 11–12}

Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain how the Paderborn method works. It is generally accepted that the learning of any language makes the learning of all subsequent languages easier.^[9] Norman Williams argues that Esperanto provides this benefit to a greater degree than natural languages because of its simplicity and its familiarity to English speakers, stating that Esperanto is six times easier to learn than French or German, and that 89% of Esperanto roots are recognizably related to words in English.^[10]

Helen Eaton argues that some of Esperanto's benefit comes from the vocabulary and grammar that it shares with the target language. Lexical analyses have found that 80% of Esperanto roots are similar to the corresponding Latin root, 20% to the corresponding German,^[11] and 66% to the corresponding Italian.^[12] Eaton also notes that Esperanto grammar has noun-adjective agreement and an accusative case, which are also found in the grammars of French, German, and Latin.^[11]

Angela Tellier argues that a key factor is the positive attitude toward language learning that Esperanto provides students. Experiments consistently suggest that a student of Esperanto can reach proficiency faster than a student of a natural language.^[13] This rapid progress reinforces the student's self-confidence as a language learner^[14] and their enthusiasm for language learning,^[11] both of which encourage them to persevere in their future language learning endeavors.

• Psychopedagogy