Mia kato~
“Under the sacred sign of hope, gather peaceful warriors” (Esperanto, anti-nationalist, 1911)
Mia patrino havas afisxon de cxi tiu bildo en sia domo.
No… This is not a correct sentence. What you want is “Iru vocxdoni” - go (in order) to vote.
Vocxdono is a noun and in this structure would be the subject of iri, I.e. a vote is the thing going. Additionally verbs in the infinitive tense (-i) don’t get to have subjects anyway, so this phrase is both grammatically and logically incorrect.
This is NOT correct! In Esperanto you don’t place two nouns next to each other like this to make a compound word like in English. This should be “kukurbospico” or “kukurba spico”.
A lot of people have trouble saying “Thank you for…” in Esperanto. One helpful tip is to remember that “Dankon” is an abbreviation of a longer sentence: “[Mi donas al vi] dankon” (“[I give you] thanks”). When you write out the whole sentence errors often become more obvious:
It is also appropriate to say “Mi dankas vin” which would have similar forms to the (correct)
examples above. This is similar to the English expression “[I] thank you”, but it is not correct to just say “dankas vin”.
Note that the abbreviated sentence fact applies to other greetings/phrases such as “Saluton” and “bonan tagon” as well.
Tiu sento, kiam vi trovas Esperantiston en via ne-Esperanta libro.
I’ve been spending a lot of time at StackOverflow, and I’ve
noticed a trend. There are a lot of questions about how to translate some word,
often an English slang term/idiom/neologism, phrased like this: “How do you
translate x? … By x, I mean ‘y’”, where y is a longer phrase or sentence that either
carries the same meaning as the single word x or specifies one of several meanings of x.
In almost all of the cases at StackOverflow, a good one/two
word answer is found that is appropriate, but I want to point out that, if you
ever find yourself in this situation, thinking “How do I say x (meaning y)?”, you
can just say y.
Esperanto style values both clarity and conciseness, but philosophically clarity is more important. The language is meant primarily as a communication tool, so clearly saying what you mean in many words is arguably more valuable than using a single word that others may or may not understand.
To illustrate, here are some examples from questions I’ve seen:
Obviously, you need to be able to find a balance, which comes with practice and exposure, but while you are learning, don’t be afraid to rephrase yourself. And if you need to do a lot of research and twist your brain around to come up with a concise translation, be aware that it may not be very clear to people who haven’t yet done that.
Anonymous asked:
Well, I first started learning it because I had a lot of free time my freshman year of college and I knew my mom had studied it, so I took it up as a hobby. I mostly read stuff; I buy a lot of books with interesting-sounding summaries from Esperanto-USA. I used to write some (way back in my blog you can find some stuff like articles and stories that I wrote), but I’m too busy and tired now to a) come up with things to write about, b) actually write anything, or c) work up the nerve to post it. I’ve written way more in Esperanto than in English, though, because it takes a lot of the pressure off. I am not comfortable posting stuff I write in English online, but when I write in Esperanto I know that not a lot of people will read it, and the people who do read it will forgive my lack of skill due to lack of other options and (maybe) not being super familiar with the language.
One thing I experienced due to learning Esperanto which may count as a “personal reason to use it” was the opportunity to not only meet but to interact and communicate with people who do not speak any English at all. Living in the U.S., I often meet people who may not speak English very well, but all of the interactions I have here are in English. Sometimes on the Internet and when I went to NASK though, I had a chance to speak with people without even having the option of falling back on English - which I think is a valuable experience that everyone should have. That is a benefit of learning almost any language, but through Esperanto I’ve talked to people from the Ukraine, Japan, China, Brazil, etc. I mean, I haven’t become an expert or even very knowledgeable on any of those cultures, but it certainly makes the world seem smaller and more friendly.
I don’t know if that even answered your question at all, but I hope you got something out of all that rambling… :P
