Something I've noticed about E-o is the way adverbs and verbs seem interchangeable. Of course this is a fumdamental premise of the grammar. For example, I've just come across, "Ni kutimis recevi" (literally we were accustomed to receive). But more usual, in English, we would say "we usually receive", or "Ni kutime recevis", which, of course, means the same thing and equally good E-o

I know this is a feature of how one language works versus another. It is even quite cute that you can do this in E-o. But I find it stalls my understaning. I know that "kutime" is usually and then I see "kutimis" and sit there thinking, "how can I verb usually". Mostly I can't think of a verb and have to resort to the vortaro and hope that there is an entry specifically for the verb form that shows how someone else has managed to make a verb out of it.

It works the other way too. Today I saw "ŝajne". Now I know ŝajni, to seem. And I sit there, thinking how can I adverb "to seem", "seemsly"?, "in the manner of seems"? maybe "seemingly"? Or perhaps seemingly ought to be "ŝajnante", maybe it is "seems like". It really slows the interpretation.

I kind of assume I'll get used to this someday. But are there any tips for how to accelerate this process?

Basically, when I read E-o that was written by someone whose first langauge was English, I read it fine. Indeed I don't seem to have a problem too much reading E-o from someone I correspond with who speaks virtually no English - but their E-o is (though better than mine) not 100% fluent I think. As soon as I get E-o written by someone who is a properly fluent E-o speaker, I just go wow, stop, that was way too fast, too many words used in ways I never thought of. And there doesn't seem any intermediate stage. You either find simplistic E-o texts that are easy apart from maybe vocabulary and there are proper E-o texts that may as well still be written in Chinese as far as I am concerned.

How do you get over this hump in the learning process, other than with a lot of painfully slow reading of seemingly difficult to interpret text?

Nick

This still throws me sometimes, but usually only for a moment.

The trick, in my case, was to train myself to read eo without translating it. At first this was difficult, but it became easier with practice. Now I only occasionally have to resort to mental translation, when the sentence constructions are so different from English that on first look they appear to just be random words strung together (sometimes they are - heh - but more often they are just a different reordering of the way English would put them together).

Read a sentence without translating it in your head. Did you understand it? If so, move on. If not, then translate it. But only do so if you truly are drawing a blank.

What happens is that you start to accustom yourself to the eo way of stringing things together, and it starts to get into your head as a natural kind of thing. As long as you are mentally translating into English, you aren't really reading eo - you're reading encoded English. And, as you have noticed, many things don't directly encode into English.

When you were a kid, just learning English, that's how it worked. You learned "I go", but instead of "I goed" you also learned "I went". Pure repetition finally lodged "I went" in your head as the past tense of "I go", and now it seems completely natural. But, in fact, it's highly irregular. That's the sort of thing you need to do with eo - just smack up against those expressions that seem odd (because of our English predispositions) until they seem natural. It takes time, and it takes practice. But I can attest that it does actually happen after a while.

But the key is to NOT translate. Read it in its native form, understand it in its native form, and eventually it will appear completely natural to you.

It sounds to me like your Esperanto is getting quite good! As RiotNrrd said you need to focus now on thinking in Esperanto, only translating back to English when the meaning isn't immediately clear to you. Try reading through articles in magazines or online, the more you practice the more natural it becomes.

Thanks. I do try to do as you suggest. Usually, at the moment, there is just too much vocabulary to learn. So, I can only do it with the basic course texts - but then I am dissatisfied and want to read other stuff. Some of it is not too bad - but the fluent E-o people are just too hard to follow. Which is kind of disappointing - almost defeats the point of trying to learn this type of language.... ooh err....

Most of the course material I've found here or elsewhere concerns itself with teaching grammar and general vocabulary. E-o seems to be (justly) proud of its word building capabilities and the fact that nouns can be turned into verbs can be turned into adjectives etc. But the assumption seems to be that this sort of thing is all simple - and it isn't always. There doesn't seem to be any course material that deliberately throws words at you in unusual ways and helps you through that (perhaps because it might be specific to the particular native language of the student...)

Nick

nw2394:
Most of the course material I've found here or elsewhere concerns itself with teaching grammar and general vocabulary. E-o seems to be (justly) proud of its word building capabilities and the fact that nouns can be turned into verbs can be turned into adjectives etc. But the assumption seems to be that this sort of thing is all simple - and it isn't always. There doesn't seem to be any course material that deliberately throws words at you in unusual ways and helps you through that (perhaps because it might be specific to the particular native language of the student...)

Nick

I'd suggest the novels of Claude Piron (writing as Johan Valano) for this purpose. Piron has a gift for coming up with constructions that make full use of the resources of Esperanto, and the books are very entertaining as well.

T0dd:I'd suggest the novels of Claude Piron (writing as Johan Valano) for this purpose.

Thanks.

Nick