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Learning correlatives and affixes

von CKyle22, 25. April 2009

Beiträge: 32

Sprache: English

jchthys (Profil anzeigen) 27. April 2009 23:46:49

I recommend first getting -u and -o down pat in all five forms. Then add the others one at a time: -e, then -am, then -al, then -a, ktp.

ceigered (Profil anzeigen) 28. April 2009 12:21:42

This is when sticky threads would be good ridulo.gif

darkweasel (Profil anzeigen) 30. April 2009 13:08:36

Personally, I think the best way to learn such things is to use them!

Go to the Esperanto language forum and talk a bit - and if you can't remember one of the correlatives/affixes, have the page in your bookmarks and look for it. Over time, you'll learn them. It's what I did and it worked.

Other hint: If you, for example, don't remember what "always" means but can remember what "never" is (neniam), you already got the -am ending and just have to replace that one with "chi-"

Also note that this is still easier than in most other languages, for example, there is no similarity between English "always" and "never", although they're related words.

hiyayaywhopee (Profil anzeigen) 7. Mai 2009 12:26:03

I guess the best advice I can give is try different things until you find what works for you.

To learn the suffixes, I just broke them off into groups of two: o and u (sort of the default ones), a and e (give an answer in the part of speech that normally ends with that letter), el and el (the how and the why), am and om (both give quantitative answers), and es (sort of the odd one out).

jchthys (Profil anzeigen) 27. Mai 2009 02:48:56

This post might also be helpful for beginners.

ceigered (Profil anzeigen) 27. Mai 2009 07:01:09

jchthys:This post might also be helpful for beginners.
They also have good blogs about other languages too.
e.g.
http://www.transparent.com/swedish/
http://www.transparent.com/russian/
and so forth.
(just thought I'd add that)

Polarina (Profil anzeigen) 31. Mai 2009 11:25:25

This table is very helpful to learn the correlatives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_vocabulary#...

erinja (Profil anzeigen) 26. Oktober 2011 13:17:13

Someone has visited this page and sent a message to the lernu staff, with the text "Utterly confusing. I thought this was supposed to be an easy language to learn"

Unfortunately, the person didn't leave an address or a username, so we're unable to respond. But perhaps the person who sent the message is still reading this thread, and maybe others had the same thought, so I'm going to respond publicly as I would have responded privately. Maybe some others on the thread have their own thoughts to share.

---

Esperanto is easier than other languages, but that doesn't mean "easy"; you still need to expend some effort and memorize some rules. In this particular case, the table of correlatives is a logical way of organizing a set of words that have little relation to one another in other languages. So instead of memorizing a long list of words, you learn a table, and you form the words using the table.

Some people complain that the "ki-" words look too much alike, and it's hard to keep them straight. They look alike because they have something in common, much like the English wh- or th- words. I could imagine a learner of English complaining that these wh words look alike and are hard to tell apart. But you can see wh and th words in English work in a similar way to Esperanto's table of correlatives, though of course Esperanto's system is regular, and that of English is not. Below is an "English table of correlatives"; the logical structures that aren't words in English, or that mean something else, are crossed out

wh/at = ki/o / th/at = ti/o
wh/o = ki/u / th/o = ti/u
wh/ich = ki/u / th/ich = ti/u
wh/y = ki/al / th/y = ti/al
wh/en = ki/am / th/en = ti/am
wh/ere = ki/e / th/ere = ti/e
wh/ither = ki/e/n / th/ither = ti/e/n

Donniedillon (Profil anzeigen) 26. Oktober 2011 14:47:08

ceigered:This is when sticky threads would be good ridulo.gif
+1

darkweasel (Profil anzeigen) 26. Oktober 2011 14:53:43

erinja:
wh/y = ki/al / th/y = ti/al
wh/erefore = ki/al / th/erefore = tial
lango.gif

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