Mi havas 29 jarojn. Antaŭ 11 jaroj mi ekprenis mian unuan Esperanto-leronlibron... sed mi ankoraŭ ne povas paroli tiun ĉi riproĉindan lingvon! Kontraste, mi jam ellernis la francan post nur 5 monatoj. Esperanto estas la plej malfacila lingvo EN LA TUTA MONDO! Manko de malregulaj verboj apenaŭ kompensas la mokindan, ne-priskriban vortaron kaj verbajn specojn. La transitiva/netransitiva verbspeco de Esperanto igas min opinii ke ties S-ro Zamenhof fumis matematikon aŭ maĉis sekiĝitan farbon!

goliath07:I am 29 years old. I picked up my first book on learning Esperanto when I was 18. I still can't speak this stupid language. I learned French in 5 months. Esperanto is the most difficult language to learn IN THE WORLD. Having no irregular verbs hardly makes up for the ridiculous, non-descriptive vocabulary and verb forms. The transitive/intransitive verb form of esperanto makes me think it's creator smoked meth or chewed on dried paint.

tommjames:He didn't use "malpuriĝas" because he didn't mean "get's dirty". As I explained in my last post, "puri" would mean "be clean", therefore "ĝi malpuras kiel lavĉifono" means "it's as dirty as a dish rag".

I see. My mistake. Maybe it's my English background, but I would expect "esti pura" for "to be clean" rather than "puri" although logically presumably either one would serve. The Tekstaro seems to agree - there are many hits for "estas pura" as opposed to the two for "malpuras" and none for "puras" or "puri" alone. Maybe there's some nuance to "(mal)puras" that eludes me.

hebda999:

antoniomoya:...But if I want to learn, for exemple, English, I have to learn to pronounce EACH English word, to memorize EACH one of them, (thousands and thousands) due to the irregularities of the language.

Don't exaggerate, English is regular, it just has thousands of thousands of exceptions. That's all.

Concerning the pronunciation, the irregularities in English are mostly in the vowels, while the consonants are relatively (!) regular.

creedelambard:Maybe it's my English background, but I would expect "esti pura" for "to be clean" rather than "puri" although logically presumably either one would serve. The Tekstaro seems to agree - there are many hits for "estas pura" as opposed to the two for "malpuras" and none for "puras" or "puri" alone

Yes it's more common to use "estas X-a" with an adjective root, but "X-as" is certainly not wrong. I think of it as 'casual' usage.

creedelambard:Maybe there's some nuance to "(mal)puras" that eludes me.

Using an adjective root as a verb can sometimes carry a somewhat "active" nuance. One example is "la lago bluas", where "bluas" means something more like "radiates blueness" than simply "is blue". Whether "malpuras" could carry any such nuance I'm not certain, but in the case of that phrase from Tekstaro it seems to me nothing more than shorthand for "estas malpura".

The nuance that distinguishes malpuras from estas malpura is the difference between -as and -a.

Malpur in compounds is malpura with the -a lobbed off. Why? Because (generally) pur in compounds is pura with the -a lobbed off and mal doesn't shift the meaning from a state, it merely makes the opposite (also a state).

So malpuras is malpur(a)as. Now the -as adds a verbal slant to the idea of malpura. Or putting it another way, -as adds its own meaning to the state.

Verbs can be states or actions. Adding a state idea to something that is already a state achieves nothing so a choice of malpuras over estas malpura can imply an action nuance.

Consider ŝi malpuras kiel havena putino in contrast to ŝi estas malpura kiel havena putino. To my mind the latter just presents her as unwashed. The former presents her as filthy in her behaviour.

The force of -as tacked on to stem of words whose dictionary entry is in the adjective form will depend on the word, and what we know of the world.

For example rapidas (to hurry) is redolent with action. Compare la trajno rapidis for with la trajno estis rapida for. The latter sounds a little strange.

In contrast compare the difference between tio malfacilas and tio estas malfacila, where the difference is far less pronounced.

hebda999:

antoniomoya:...But if I want to learn, for exemple, English, I have to learn to pronounce EACH English word, to memorize EACH one of them, (thousands and thousands) due to the irregularities of the language.

Don't exaggerate, English is regular, it just has thousands of thousands of exceptions. That's all.

Every language is regular. It is just that the grammar descriptions are not complicated enough.

creedelambard:My guess is that the OP had unrealistic expectations of the amount of work one has to put in to learn Esperanto. There are dozens of ways to learn anything, and if one doesn't work, another will. It makes me wonder where he was attempting to teach himself and whether a more organized system might have benefitted him better.

I think that sometimes Esperanto advocates and users oversell the supposed "easiness" of Esperanto. Individuals' (especially adults' ) capabilities for learning languages vary all over the map. Some will find learning a particular language much easier or much harder than do others. Yes, IMNSHO E-o is easier than other languages I have studied, but nevertheless it is not "easy" for me (no language is). I assert that advocates should emphasize that E-o is "easiER" to learn than many languages, not that it is "easy."

darkweasel:

RiotNrrd:Considering that goliath07 has (currently) a total of six posts to his name, he clearly hasn't asked too many questions during his eleven year nightmare.

I have no sympathy for people who can find the time to complain that it's "too hard", but don't have time to actually ask for help with it.

+1, and every time it's stranger how people here feed trolls and semi-trolls... :/

The "transitivity problem" is a problem because of the way most of us learn Esperanto (or other languages, for that matter). We learn a new word, such as bruli, and we say to ourselves "Ah, that means 'burn', as if the word bruli is a direct translation of the English word "burn." But it isn't. As a general thing, words in Esperanto, or any other language, can't be thought of as simple equivalents of English words. The meaning of the Esperanto word bruli is simply konsumiĝi per fajro. That meaning is intransitive. So, if you learn what the word actually means, there's no extra step of memorizing that it's intransitive.

If, on the other hand, you learn bruli as simply translating the English verb "burn", you must also remember that it in fact only translates the intransitive meaning of that verb. In English, some verbs, but certainly not all, have both transitive and intransitive meanings: burn, boil, drown, fly, drive, and a few others. The transitive meaning is the causative version of the intransitive meaning: "burn" in the transitive sense means "to cause to burn." So okay, that's a "feature" of English. Esperanto verbs have a more restricted meaning, either transitive or intransitive. If that meaning is intransitive then you form the causative version the same way all the time, using -IG. So if you know what bruli actually means, there's no question about how to use it in the transitive sense: bruligi. This doesn't make Esperanto the hardest language in the world.

There has been controversy in Esperanto about the wisdom of "root classes," i.e., having to know that pur- is "fundamentally" an adjective, pura, not a verb. The classic example is kombi, which is fundamentally a verb, versus brosi, which is considered a derivation from a noun. So you need to form kombilo to refer to the thing you use for combing, but you don't say brosilo because broso is already the noun you want. Kombo, if used at all, would simply mean a particular combing, or maybe way of combing.

Post vizito al la tondisto, mi ne ŝatis la kombon de mia hararo. (After a visit to the barber, I didn't like the way my hair was combed)

This can indeed be confusing, but to do away with this property of Esperanto you have to introduce more complicated rules of word derivation. This is what Ido did, and it's not clear that they ended up with something easier on the learner.

tommjames:

goliath07:Pura - Clean
Puri - to clean? NoPE!
Purigi! or maybe puriĝi I still have no clue.

However Prava will translate to pravi.

Actually the relationship between prava and pravi is exactly the same as between pura and puri, because these are both adjectival roots:

prava = right
pravi = be right

pura = clean
puri = be clean

It's actually not that tricky, when you understand the principle that roots have an inherent leaning to a particular part of speech ("root classes" as it is called in Esperanto). The root pur' is basically adjectival, so of course you must say purigi (igi pura) for "to clean", and puriĝi (iĝi pura) for "get clean". It works the same way with prav' and other adjectival roots.

Sometimes it's not obvious what class a root belongs to, and in these cases it can indeed be tricky to come up with the right form. But IMO it's generally not that hard.

By the way, the fact you "have no clue" as to whether puriĝi means to clean (it doesn't, and never could) suggests to me a basic misunderstanding of the meaning of -iĝ. This being the case it's little wonder you're experiencing difficulty. It would be a shame if you gave up over something like that, because such basic misunderstandings are very easy to correct. This page may help.

I concur with this, sounds logic to me that puri cannot mean be clean.