Esperanto in 17 minutes

(This is not an Esperanto course, but it should give an idea what the language is, and you could probably learn most of what you need from this and reading a few things.)

Esperanto is a set of word roots, and a system for arranging them, so that they can be used to complement each other. Let's begin.

Look out of the window. It's probably raining. The root is pluv-.

Rain is a reason to say something. To say that it is raining, take the root "pluv-", and make it into a verb, by adding the ending that means "happening now": -as.

That's a sentence. A sentence is built around a verb - that verb contains the reason for making the sentence, and a marker that says when that thing happens. There are five endings:

Sometimes you want to say who or what is doing the verb. That's very easy - take the root for that thing, and make it a noun with the -o ending. A noun just dropped into a sentence is doing the verb:

If you want to use another concept to describe a noun, then take the root for the concept, and add -a to make it an adjective:

Maybe there is another concept that somehow relates to this action. Perhaps there's a place where it happens. To add another noun, you can introduce it with a preposition, to say how it relates to the action.

Sometimes there's no obvious preposition to choose, or maybe you just don't feel like it, so you can mark the noun (and its adjectives) with a -n ending, to say "you know what this is about".

By the way, because everything is neatly marked, you can shuffle the words around a bit:

But don't go overboard with that, just use it when it makes the sentence easier to understand.

There's just one more type of word to learn, which is adverbs. I don't know what exactly an adverb is, but it ends with -e and it's used to describe anything that isn't a noun. They are very flexible (perhaps dangerously!), but start off by putting them in front of the word they describe, and you'll get the hang of it:

Sometimes you need to more specific than just "a cat" - you need to say which cat. The easiest option is to use la, which means basically "you know the one."

Or maybe you want to say something more like "the one that we are talking about":

If you need to link several sentences together, you will need some words to do that. You'll always have one main sentence, as before, but related sentences will need an introduction, e.g.

While we're in the mood, let's do all the pronouns:

"But", you ask, "what about sex-neutrality?". Well, we'll come back to that later.

Okay, now we have a tricky bit coming up. Ready? Sometimes you want to link sentences together in a special way, where you take an idea from one sentence and kind of bring it into the other. There we use the word kiu, which is like tiu, but it is specifically for referring to an idea inside a new sentence:

Hmm, is it clear enough that the "kiu" is about the cat? Yes, probably, but we can be explicit:

In fact, we can pull any idea out the main sentence, and put it into a sub-sentence, we just have to say what type of thing it is:

In fact, there are some shortcuts you can use for this sort of thing:

We'll do the whole set of those words at some point, but just one more for now: Sometimes you just want to talk about a .. thing. It's maybe not clear what sort of thing is that thing, it's just a thing. Let's try that:

Oh yeah, those ki- words are also good for asking questions. Think of them as meaning "fill in the appropriate thing here, please". There's also a simple way to make a yes/no question:

Right, just one more big thing to cover. We'll start off easy, and then go nuts with it. If you want to describe something twice, e.g. with a type and a name, then just put them both in together:

But what if you can't find a word for something? Well, you'll need to use a sentence. Think of the sentence as taking the place of a name: it's enough information to say what you're talking about, but in multiple words. So let's try:

"la ideon" (the idea) isn't enough information, because it doesn't say what that idea is, so we add a sentence that says what the idea is. The little word ke just says "here is a sentence coming up now". There's a lot that you can do with this, and there's scope for confusion, so let's try a couple of things:

Yeah, that isn't good english, but you get the idea? The word "tio" means "that thing", but what thing?! It doesn't say!! Well, that's why we added a sentence to explain. In fact, the "tio" isn't very interesting, we could possibly leave it out. For that matter, we might not need the "pro" either - you'd guess that this was about the cause of something, right? Maybe we could just say:

But remember! The more words you throw out, the higher the chance of everything exploding!

Speaking of leaving things out, there's a special kind of verb-thing, that isn't really a verb. If a word ends in -i, then it's a sort of general idea of a verb. It's not happening, it's just sort of existing, and hinting that a full sentence exists, but isn't being said. But try to consider whether someone could misunderstand.

And finally, there are some things I can't be bothered to explain. They will certainly be confusing, and often involve the very useful roots ig and iĝ.

And then there are participles, which are for using action-concepts to describe things, such as describing something as having-been-done. There are 6 of those to deal with, but they follow a nice patttern, so you'll get the idea. Probably.

Oh wait, I promised to talk about those ki- and ti- and neni- words, and then I didn't. In fact I never even mentioned neni- before now. Oh well, here's some word starts and ends, just put them together yourself:

Somehow I've left out some pretty basic words, so let's just have a look at a few sentences:

Yeah. That'll do.

So what now? Learn, use, enjoy! There's an online course at lernu.net, one at Duolingo, or there's Esperanto in 12 lessons. Or even better, join a course taught by La Londona Esperanto-Klubo.

Ĉu vi povas helpi traduki ĉi tiun paĝon en alian lingvon? Vidu ĉi tion.