Introduction to Esperanto: Lesson 1

The Esperanto word for it is ĝi.

This letter Ĝ is one of the few special letters in Esperanto. It represent the sound g in gist (or Jack). When people write in Esperanto, they usually informally write gx instead of ĝ if they don’t have ĝ on their keyboard.

The Esperanto word for is is estas.

How would you write:

?It is Esperanto.|Ĝi estas Esperanto.

The Esperanto word for what is kio.

The word order is not very important in Esperanto so you can just keep it the same as in English in most cases. How would you say:

?What is Esperanto?|Kio estas Esperanto?

The Esperanto word for a language is lingvo.

This comes from the same root the word linguistics comes from. How would you say:

?Esperanto is a language.|Esperanto estas lingvo.

The Esperanto word for that (in that is good but not in that car) is tio.

Do you see the resemblance between the words kio and tio? This is because tio is that and kio is the kuestion word which makes that into what (just like in English, you have th instead of t and wh instead of k).

The Esperanto word for and is kaj.

This word is pretty cool because it comes from Ancient Greek. How would you say:

?That is Esperanto and Esperanto is a language.|Tio estas Esperanto kaj Esperanto estas lingvo.

If you talk about Esperanto, you want to describe it as well. Let’s look at a few possibilities.

The Esperanto word for easy is facila.

You have the same root in the word facilitate except the c in facila is pronounced like ts in tsunami. Knowing that, how would you say:

?Esperanto is easy.|Esperanto estas facila.

As you’ll start seeing in this course, this is very true. How would you say more sophisticatedly:

?Esperanto is an easy language.|Esperanto estas facila lingvo.

Let’s learn one more:

The Esperanto word for good is bona.

You have this Latin root bon which means good in a number of words that come from French (such as bon appétit). How would you say:

?Esperanto is a good and easy language.|Esperanto estas bona kaj facila lingvo.

Now, imagine that you wanted to negate all that. The opposite of easy is difficult.

If you want to get the opposite of some word in Esperanto, you add mal to the front of that word.

So, if facila is easy, can you guess what difficult would be?

?Difficult|Malfacila

How would you say:

?It is difficult.|Ĝi estas malfacila.

What about:

?That is bad.|Tio estas malbona.

Finally:

The Esperanto word for not is ne.

It works just like in English except you always put it in front of the word that you are negating. So, if you want to say is not you say not is or ne estas. This way it is a lot more consistent than in English. You in English you say: not me, not today, not blue but does not (should be not does, shouldn’t it?) where in Esperanto it’s always ne (something).

How would you say:

?It is not easy.|Ĝi ne estas facila.

?Esperanto isn’t difficult.|Esperanto ne estas malfacila.

?Esperanto is a good language and it is not difficult.|Esperanto estas bona lingvo kaj ĝi ne estas malfacila.

Of course, it would be possible to not repeat the two words and simply say Esperanto estas bona lingvo kaj ne malfacila like you can say Esperanto is a good language and not difficult instead of Esperanto is a good language and it is not difficult in English. We are just doing the longer way in the examples because... well, if you know the longer, the shorter is easy too.

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