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Beginning Esperanto | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Shinn Trilingual Tetraglot Groupie India gallery.takingitglob Joined 6212 days ago 61 posts - 69 votes  Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Oriya*, SpanishB2 Studies: FrenchB1, Japanese, Irish | Message 9 of 23 21 May 2007 at 9:51am | IP Logged | ||
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Week Two:
Week Two has been rather unfruitful. Thanks to college work and some other commitments I couldn't devote much time to my Esperanto lessons. Moreover my tutor is away for a few days so I couldn't send him the exercises. On the other hand, while browsing lernu.net I discovered that the "Ana Pana" course was rather good; I quite like the interactive exercises which also include listening exercises. The email course is good as well but it offloads a lot of information on you; for example just giving you a list of the roots and endings with which to make words such as "kiom" or "neniu" and it's rather cumbersome to memorize. Plus, I learn better through exercises and the course has only a few, mostly translation exercises. So I've decided to combine Ana Pana and the email course. So far I've completed 3 lessons of Ana Pana and I'm still on lesson 5 in the email course. Hopefully this week I'll have some more free time to devote to the lessons. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| awake Senior Member United States Joined 6436 days ago 406 posts - 438 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 10 of 23 21 May 2007 at 8:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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What you're referring to is a list of words called correlatives. It's a series
of words that are all related to one another based of fundamental "question" words like who, what, when, where, why, and how. In English, some of these fall according to a pattern. For example Where -> there -> somewhere -> anywhere -> everywhere -> nowhere But this pattern isn't perfectly regular When -> then (so far so good) but -> someTIME -> anytime -> always (totally off the pattern now) -> never In esperanto, these words are all perfectly regular. They're so regular in fact, that you can construct a table out of them. As you've seen, you can break down all these special words into a combination of 5 beginnings and 9 possible endings (45 words total). For some people, it's easier just to memorize 45 separate words. For others, it's easer to learn the pattern used to make the table (so you only have to memorize the 5 beginnings and 9 endings (14 things total)). These words are used a lot in Esperanto, so you'll find that once you get them down they get reinforced fairly often. For what it's worth, this was the first thing in Esperanto that I found difficult. There are some very subtle points (when to use kiu and when to use kio, for example). It was the first part of esperanto that frustrated the heck out of me :). But it came with practice. Just keep at it and it will fall into place for you. Good Luck! :)
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| Shinn Trilingual Tetraglot Groupie India gallery.takingitglob Joined 6212 days ago 61 posts - 69 votes Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Oriya*, SpanishB2 Studies: FrenchB1, Japanese, Irish | Message 11 of 23 01 June 2007 at 5:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you awake. The correlatives were a little cumbersome at first because I had the whole load of them dumped on me but I'm getting the hang of it now.
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| Shinn Trilingual Tetraglot Groupie India gallery.takingitglob Joined 6212 days ago 61 posts - 69 votes Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Oriya*, SpanishB2 Studies: FrenchB1, Japanese, Irish | Message 12 of 23 06 June 2007 at 4:17am | IP Logged | ||
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Weeks Three and Four:
Time constraints rear their ugly head again! I didn't have much to report for week 3 by itself so I've combined it with week 4 which was a little more productive. I've managed to complete Ana Pana and I'm planning to move on to Gerda Malaperis this week. I can understand simple phrases using the three basic tenses (past, present and future), the imperative and the conditional tense. The vocabulary lists at lernu are helping quite a bit. Although I've got the hang of the correlatives now I still muddle them up sometimes (I especially have problems remembering the difference between "kial" and "kiel"). My Spanish-French hangover seems to be fading apart from the occasional slip up. I got a confidence boost this week as well. Happily, I have enough vocabulary to keep up a simple correspondence in Esperanto (I must say that so far the lernu users I've met, and Esperanto speakers indeed are a friendly lot). One stumbling block in my path is the lack of a good English-Esperanto dictionary. I did download one from Project Gutenberg but it's not very conclusive. A good one would help me in faster vocabulary acquisition. Anyway, at this moment I'm aiming more at having fun with and exploring the language rather than being fluent in 6 weeks. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6270 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 13 of 23 06 June 2007 at 4:38am | IP Logged | ||
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Lernu contains a very good English-Esperanto dictionary. If you enter an Esperanto conjugated word or one with affixes it can even break these apart and give you a meaning - this is great if you can't find a word in regular dictionaries because of the affixes.
You could also try ReVo, though that's best used as a monolingual Esperanto dictionary imho. If you are ready to buy one, Teach Yourself's English-Esperanto dictionary is very good. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Shinn Trilingual Tetraglot Groupie India gallery.takingitglob Joined 6212 days ago 61 posts - 69 votes Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Oriya*, SpanishB2 Studies: FrenchB1, Japanese, Irish | Message 14 of 23 21 June 2007 at 3:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you Sprachprofi, although I have to confess I haven't been much of a serious student lately. I actually didn't touch my Esperanto material for over a week thanks to college and my new job that I'm starting. I do wish I could find more media in Esperanto. So far I've come across only two movie references and Esperanto music is not easily found.
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| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6270 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 15 of 23 21 June 2007 at 3:42am | IP Logged | ||
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You can find a lot of legal mp3s of Esperanto music at http://esperanto-panorama.net/unikode/muziko.htm.
There are even more on the DVD-Rom "Esperanto Elektronike", which contains: - two short films informing about Esperanto (in Esperanto with subtitles in more than 20 languages) - Esperanto courses, including offline versions of Lernu courses - dictionaries - materials for informing about Esperanto - essays in and about Esperanto and interlinguistics - the entire Esperanto Wikipedia - ebooks and magazines in Esperanto - photos of Esperanto meetings - software and computer games in Esperanto - mp3s of many Esperanto bands - internet links - samples of Esperanto concerts and of a video-based Esperanto course I can send this DVD to anybody interested at cost. As for Esperanto literature, you can find a lot of ebooks at http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/Literaturo/literaturo.htm l. These are mostly old works though, due to copyright. I would also like to recommend the novel "Fajron sentas mi interne" because it was originally written in Esperanto and it has become a classic already even though it was written only about 10 years ago. Besides, it is rather easy to read, the language is not very hard. You can find an online version of the text at the author's homepage, but if you like the book you should order it - it's so much nicer to read with the real Esperanto letters and on real pages rather than the screen. It's quite cheap, too, I believe I paid 7 Euros including shipping within Germany. As for Esperanto movies there are indeed not many and some (like "Incubus") butcher the language because it's not their intention to be an Esperanto movie. Since you're a beginner, maybe you'd like the movie "Gerda Malaperis", based on the book for beginners. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6397 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 16 of 23 21 June 2007 at 4:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks a lot for the links, Sprachprofi. Music has always been an important part of my language study and it's been strange not to listen to it in Esperanto. too bad that site has rock and pop in the same section, I don't really like many of the songs I've downloaded :/ I like the Swedish band Persone quite a lot though, it seems that Scandinavians just can't play bad music ;) (there are exceptions of course)
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