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Stuck at Correlatives

de jimk2000, 2008-oktobro-11

Mesaĝoj: 12

Lingvo: English

jimk2000 (Montri la profilon) 2008-oktobro-11 21:25:48

I have been self-studying Esperanto for a couple of months (including a correspondence course). I have come to the "Table of Correlatves" and have toiled over this for going on two weeks and I still can not keep them straight.

I have used a few memory tricks such as for "Kial"(why)-"Al stayed at the "Y"MCA. but when I take any quizzes I get less than 50%. Any one else out there have the same problem with correlatives when they were learning this language?

toiletdude (Montri la profilon) 2008-oktobro-11 21:36:12

Correlatives aren't the easiest thing to learn.
But, don't stress too much over them. They aren't the kind of vocabulary that is easy to learn, but knowing the parts of them will definitely help.
This is what I was told, not to stress to much over them. And that suggestion holds true.

Just each time you find one when you're reading a story or taking a lesson, click on it, and read it (and the definition) aloud. Even if you know that particular one.

Eventually you'll remember them.

It may also help to make flashcards and go over them daily. And each day try to make sentences with the ones that you remember.

Also, from personal experience, memory tricks tend not to help with spoken Esperanto. With written they do (you have more time to think about what is given) but with spoken it can be tedious.

Hope I didn't bore you, and I hope this may help.

Miland (Montri la profilon) 2008-oktobro-11 22:03:13

Sylvan Zaft has written a good short internet text on Mastering the Correlatives, that you may find useful.

If you look at good textbooks like Teach Yourself Esperanto, you will find that they teach the correlatives piece by piece. They don't begin by asking students to memorise the whole table at once. Rome was not built in a day, so take it easy.

jan aleksan (Montri la profilon) 2008-oktobro-12 08:57:09

For -ial I have no tip, it's one of the "non-obvious" to learn.

But for -ia and -iel, you can see the use of -a- and -e-. So Kia refers to a quality (the response would be an adjective) where as Kiel refers to a manner (the response would be an adverb). (don't mix with -ie!)

Kia sxi estas? bela; kiel sxi estas? bele

-io > objekto;
-iu > ulo (even if it's not a good asociation)

-ie > ejo

-ies > sia

-iom: look carefully IOM. I see 1,0 and a "fallen" 3 . So, iom is about numbers(But maybe I have a crazy mind^^)

-iam sounds as jam, Which is also a time word.

Greetings,

eb.eric (Montri la profilon) 2008-oktobro-12 15:51:46

I know it helped me to look at the table of them and then decompose the words whenever I came across them in texts. Ie. kial: ki- (question) + -al (reason) = for what reason = why.

This way it also helps because you can reverse engineer from the ones you know. ie. you said you remember that kial = why, so you can figure out that ki- means a question and -al means a reason, so when you come across ie. tial, you already know half its meaning, and that it's not a question. Eventually the gaps will fill and it will be second nature.

Draw out the table a couple times, maybe even explain it to your friends, it will help you remember. It will also probably be pretty interesting to your friends because all in all it's a pretty elegant system for very useful words in a language.

rows: ki- ti- i- cxi- neni-
columns: -o -u -a -e -al -am [edit: forgot -es and -om]

Zafur (Montri la profilon) 2008-oktobro-12 23:02:53

I think I finally got the correlatives down pretty good when I finished the Bildoj kaj Demandoj lesson. It slowly goes through them so you know the last one pretty well before you go to the next. So just learn the easiest ones one by one until you know them all.

awake (Montri la profilon) 2008-oktobro-13 12:39:18

I had a lot of trouble with the correlatives, until I learned to make the table by building the words from the parts (as eb.eric suggested).

Each correlative is made up of a beginning part plus an ending part. There are 5 beginning parts and 9 ending parts. If you just learn the parts, that's 14 things to learn. If you try to learn all the words together, that's 45 very similar words to learn. It's a challenge to learn them all. It's much easier to just learn the 14 pieces. Once you learn them, practice putting them together. Draw out the table with all the little parts in place on the top and left side....then just put them together. Once you can build them and figure out what they mean, it will be easy to break them apart. It didn't take long at all to be able to build the chart.

Once I could do that, I made flashcards with all the full words and drilled them every day for a couple of days.

then I just read lots of esperanto. Every time I came across a tableword I deconstructed it in my head...

tiam = ti + am = that time = oh that means then

kie = ki + e = which place = oh that means where

ĉio = ĉi + o = every thing = obviously everything

etc. Having to do this while reading slowed me down at first, but I could read any correlative and figure out its meaning.

After some short period of time of reading, I stopped translating them in my head, I just knew them. And because it's such a logical system I even know the ones I rarely (if ever) encounter.

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2008-oktobro-22 01:29:56

A hint on learning correlatives - each person has something that works for them. So for some people, it's easier to memorize correlatives one by one, slowly, as if they were unrelated words. For some people, it's easiest to study the table and learn the "prefixes" and "suffixes" so they can construct and deconstruct those words logically. Try both ways and see what works best for you; there is no "one size fits all" solution here.

In any case, they usually seem tricky at first but please trust me when I say that it gets much easier, and with time, correct use of correlatives comes automatically.

trojo (Montri la profilon) 2008-oktobro-24 18:16:34

Zafur:I think I finally got the correlatives down pretty good when I finished the Bildoj kaj Demandoj lesson. It slowly goes through them so you know the last one pretty well before you go to the next. So just learn the easiest ones one by one until you know them all.
Same here. I think Bildoj kaj Demandoj is an excellent tool for learning correlatives.

guyjohnston (Montri la profilon) 2008-oktobro-26 18:51:10

There's an explanation of the table on Lernu here which you might find useful.

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