I don't mean to boast, but Lithuanian language has all the stuff that Esperanto has, so it's very easy to transfer from one grammar to another.

The hardest part about learning Esperanto for me is vocabulary and suffices. It still poses me a slight problem when I see a word with a lot of suffices to decipher what it means.

I am mainly having trouble with the "freeness" (for want of a better word) that the language has.

The accusative, on its own, is not an insurmountable problem. The freedom of word order it gives, is even kind of cute (at least for the speaker/writer - though strictly that is the least relevant - the more important point is whether the recipient of the communication understands anything by it).

The free addition of affixes is also kind of nice, and, on its own, quite expressive.

The free way in which words which are normally one part of speech can turn into another part of speech can be quite succinct and expressive too.

However, when all three of these things hit you at once all in one sentence, the originator might as well be speaking martian (to me anyway). A sentence where a verb has been turned into a passive participle and reconverted back into a verb, a prefix added somewhere you wouldn't normally have anticipated, a suffix somewhere else and the word order is nothing like what you would have said - well - eek! I can't understand many such constructions. I can even sit there with a dictionary such that I am sure that I know all the pieces of the sentence and I can make sure I've got the subject and object definitely verfied and I still cannot make out what is being said sometimes.

I am finding this a barrier to moving towards greater fluency.

Maybe it is a case of the speaker using an idiom from their native langauge - which they should have avoided. Undoubtedly this must happen sometimes. Sometimes, inevitably, one views the communication through a cloud of one's own idioms. That can happen too, of course. Maybe it is a fluent speaker taking it for granted that their communication is immediately clear to one and all, when perhaps it either a) isn't or b) getting from the komencanto stage is more difficult in this language than it ought to be.

I can't make up my mind about that yet.

Nick

nw2394:
Maybe it is a case of the speaker using an idiom from their native langauge - which they should have avoided. Undoubtedly this must happen sometimes. Sometimes, inevitably, one views the communication through a cloud of one's own idioms. That can happen too, of course. Maybe it is a fluent speaker taking it for granted that their communication is immediately clear to one and all, when perhaps it either a) isn't or b) getting from the komencanto stage is more difficult in this language than it ought to be.

Surely one's own idioms can be a problem. But I think that an advanced Esperanto speaker can, in most cases, come up with something that a beginner can easily understand with the help of a dictionary. I think the main problem is that advanced speakers don't simplify their language enough for beginners to understand it. I personally start simplifying drastically (in English *or* Esperanto) if I realize I'm speaking with a beginner. How successful I am, I don't know, but many people in this world are oblivious to the fact that you should go easy on beginners, and I'm sure that "Esperantujo" has the same share of those as the rest of the world.

Well, Alex, the funny thing is, most of the Slavic and Baltic languages regard this word order ("De kie vi estas?") perfectly natural

As for nw2394, indeed, I can imagine that free word order is quite a problem for a speaker who comes from a strict order language, especially when speaking to someone who is used to that and uses it frequently. I'm glad this wasn't problem to me, but I certainly feel your pain, because I had an opposite problem - having to stick to a predetermined word order when I learned English

Cheers!

carnifex:As for nw2394, indeed, I can imagine that free word order is quite a problem for a speaker who comes from a strict order language, especially when speaking to someone who is used to that and uses it frequently. I'm glad this wasn't problem to me, but I certainly feel your pain, because I had an opposite problem - having to stick to a predetermined word order when I learned English

Cheers!

I don't really mind free word order as such. My problem with that aspect of the language is that the courses say that free word order allows the speaker to emphasise what they want. But E-o does not define a normal word order in the first place. So which word orders are non standard and are therefore emphasising something?

When I am confronted with a different word order to what I would have anticipated I can't make up my mind if it is
a) a fluent speaker emphasising something (but I have no way to work out what that might be because it isn't defined) or
b) someone using the normal word order from their native language and they are not really trying to emphasise something at all or
c) someone using what is really normal word order for E-o, (just different to my word order) and isn't emphasising in the first place (but how am I to know that).

As a result the freedom of word order does not, therefore, empahsise anything for me. It just serves to confuse.

Part of the problem is that I speak a language where subject and object is indicated primarily by word order and I do not naturally pick up on the "n" ending. However, that is not the whole of the problem.

Nick

nw2394:I don't really mind free word order as such. My problem with that aspect of the language is that the courses say that free word order allows the speaker to emphasise what they want. But E-o does not define a normal word order in the first place. So which word orders are non standard and are therefore emphasising something?

Well, in most of the languages (that I know, at least), SVO is the default word order. Of course, if you want to sound in Esperanto as if you're speaking Latin, you can easily use SOV Anyway, let's presume SVO is the standard way. Then in most languages the emphasising occurs when the thing is moved BEFORE its usual place in the sentence order. Sort of like this:

Mian katon atakis la hundo (It was MY CAT, who was attacked by the dog (e.g., not his))
Atakis la hundo mian katon (My cat WAS ATTACKED by the dog (e.g., not left alone))

I hope you get the idea. However, I should note that you can achieve similar results just by adding stress to the word and leaving SVO intact

This is an example of what I mean, from the jokes. This example does even have much in the way of weird word order or affixes or whatever, but it still doesn't make sense.

- Kiuokaze policisto ne forprenas rajton stiri aŭtomobilon de ŝoforo pro averio?
- Nur tiam, kiam ŝoforo ĝin ne havas.

Er....

which-happeningly a policeman not take away a right to steer a car of (by?) a driver (chauffeur?) on account of an accident?

Only then, when a driver it not has.

I don't get the question and I don't get the punch line. What does the first word mean really. I can't think of an English equivalent - maybe it really means "why", but why wasn't "kiu" written. The translation for "de" is ambiguous - it could make a big difference whether it means "by" or "of". Why would a policeman wish to take away people's right's to have chauffeur driven cars anyway? In the punch line, what does "gxin" refer to, the car, the right, the accident?

I guess someone is going to translate it properly for me now.... For which I am grateful.

But the point really is that I have all the words looked up, but I still don't understand it. And this keeps on happening. And it makes me really quite frustrated.... I've been learning this language for a while now and there seems to me to a barrier between the stage of being able to translate one's native language into E-o and proper fluency. And there doesn't seem to be any courses in how to jump this gap.

Nick

You might have a look at David Jordan's _Being Colloquial in Esperanto_ as a next step. But mainly you need to read more, and see what people do with the language.

As for that joke...

"Kiuokaze policisto ne forprenas rajton stiri aŭtomobilon de ŝoforo pro averio?"

First of all, I thought "averio" meant "marine damage," i.e., shipwreck, that sort of thing. But maybe I'm mistaken.

Setting that aside, I think the main challenge is "kiuokaze". Which-happeningly is a start, but in more idiomatic English it would be "Under what circumstances" or "under what conditions". Which-occasion-ly would actually give a better sense of it. In completely idiomatic English, we'd just say "When can a policeman not take away a driver's right..." etc. Although "when can" is perfectly transparent to native English speakers, to someone else it might not be so clear that this use of "when" isn't really about time but about conditions, circumstances.

I'm not sure about averio either; I took it to mean an auto accident. But I just looked it up in an Esperanto dictionary and it means "damage to a ship or its goods" or "damage happening to goods of any kind" (first and second definitions, respectively)

Another crucial piece of information for you, Nick; although technically a "sxoforo" is a chauffeur, I would simply translate it as "driver" because even according to the classical understanding of the word, it refers to a professional driver of any kind of vehicle - so it applies equally to a professional truck/lorry driver. However, in modern colloquial Esperanto (at least among people I know), "sxoforo" is often used to refer to any kind of driver, and "sxofori" to refer to someone driving in general, especially to refer to one person driving others around (even if it's unpaid, like a bunch of friends carpooling to a party). I don't know if it's an evolving meaning of the word, or simply reflects the fact that my Esperanto-speaking friends don't carefully define their words before using them?

Another important thing - translate "rajto" as "permission" or "licence" and I think the joke will make more sense to you.

My somewhat liberal translation of the joke would be:
"In what circumstance can't a policeman take away the licence of a driver because of damage caused? - When the driver doesn't have one!"

Also, don't beat yourself up over trouble with these jokes. First of all, this particular joke uses the somewhat unusual word combination "kiuokaze", plus non-standard word order, plus a very uncommon vocab word (averio). Plus I suspect that it is depending on a modern interpretation of "sxoforo", though I may be wrong about that.

Thirdly - I always had a hard time with jokes when learning Esperanto. I remember that a later lesson in my course had a bunch of jokes as the reading material, and it took me a long time to understand them, even though I understood the individual words. Jokes often depend on clever phrasing to get the listener thinking along the wrong lines before the punchline arrives. This is why they are funny - because the punchline is unexpected. These kinds of jokes are hard for language learners to understand, because to an extent, they depend on somewhat complicated or ambiguous language. In addition, these kinds of jokes are usually "groaners", so even after you've muddled through translating the joke, you think to yourself "That's it???" I think that after all that work, you expect more of a payoff, and it's disappointing and frustrating when you don't get it!

Komuniko.