Esperanto/Lesson 3

 Previous lesson — Main page — Next lesson We will learn about adverbs in Esperanto, get to know the word "ĉu", the suffixes "-ulo" and "-ino", the ending "-n", and learn the numbers in Esperanto.

Adverbs
Adverbs are words that usually describe a characteristic of a verb, adjective, another adverb, or an entire sentence. Examples can be found in the box directly below.

In Esperanto, adverbs are most often marked by the ending -e. These are adverbs derived from other words. We will discuss this derivation in the next lesson. Several common adverbs end in -aŭ, which does not specify the part of speech of the word and is shared with some words that function as conjunctions or prepositions, or do not have a specific ending. Examples are in the short vocabulary section below.

Vocabulary
Here are the first adverbs to memorize.

Placement
Adverbs can be placed preceding or following the verb, adjective, or adverb that it modifies. Adverbs that modify an entire sentence typically come first. There is no difference in meaning.

ĉu
To ask a yes/no question in Esperanto, one only has to place "ĉu" at the beginning of the sentence (and, of course, like in English, place a question mark at the end of a written sentence). Contrary to in English, word order does not change.

"Ĉu" can also be used in indirect questions, where it translates to 'whether'. It is then always preceded by a comma.

-n
The subject of a sentence is the 'doer' of the verb and the object is the 'undergoer' of the verb. Examples can be found in the box directly below.

In English, what is the object and the subject of a sentence is indicated by where the word is in the sentence. As can be seen in the examples above, the subject (in italics) comes before the verb and the object (in bold) comes after the verb. Many pronouns in English have distinct subject and object forms: I vs. me, he vs. him, she vs. her, etc..

In Esperanto, the object of a sentence is indicated by adding the ending -n to nouns and accompanying adjectives (which may already have taken the plural ending -j) or pronouns, not by the order of the words in the sentence. The article ("la") does not take -n. Even though word order does not matter in Esperanto, there is a default word order, which is the same as the normal word order in English (first the subject, then the verb, then the object).

The numbers
The basic numbers in Esperanto are:

These regularly combine as follows:

-ulo
The suffix "-ulo" indicates a word that refers to someone characterized by the base word.

-ino
-ino is a suffix to indicate female sex.

Vocabulary
Here are more words to memorize.

Exercises
Write out the following numbers: (answers)
 * 11, 14, 21, 34, 77, 17, 99, 67, 76, 54, 38, 22, 83, 92, 50, 93, 87, 78, 90
 * 108, 104, 112, 184, 200, 307, 503, 808, 818, 311, 271, 511, 401, 837, 983, 543, 651, 765, 345, 813, 173, 148, 713, 607, 670, 573, 963, 842, 633, 752, 937
 * 2014, 2007, 1954, 1945, 1859, 1914, 1801, 1777, 1653, 2373, 8472, 2367, 2151, 2263, 2177, 8371, 8297, 7939, 4567, 7654, 9369, 3713, 5407, 4095

Now, let's play with affixes:
 * Go through the words in this lesson and tack on mal-. What do they mean then? (answers)
 * Go through the words in this lesson and the previous one and tack on -ulo and -ino wherever meaningful. Also see if you can tack on both and either or both with mal-. What do these words mean then? (answers)

There are one or more grammatical mistakes in each of the following five sentences. Where?

You can continue practicing by translating the following sentences:

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