Buying books online.
I just paid 49 Euro for two new books; the new Wells dictionary and 'Being colloquial in Esperanto'. I ordered them from the UEA but the order intructions were in Esperanto! Very difficult for me because I am a beginner. I hope I didn't make errors!
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Gratulon pro via unua acxeto! Bonan studadon!
ReplyDeleteHey, this is Trojo from Lernu.net. Hopefully you won't find my corrections too hair-splitting!
ReplyDeleteMi ĵus pagis €49 por du novaj libroj; la nova vortaro de Wells kaj 'Being colloquial in Esperanto'. Mi mendis ilin de UEA sed la menda instrukcioj estis en Esperanto! Tre malfacile por mi ĉar mi estas komencanto. Mi esperas ke mi ne faris erarojn!
"En Esperanto" instead of "en la Esperanto" because Esperanto is a proper noun and as such doesn't take "la". You could alternatively say "en la esperanta lingvo", because "esperanta" isn't a proper noun, and there are no proper adjectives in Esperanto. I don't know if that's a clear explaination or not.
Similarly with UEA-- there should be no "la" in front of it even though you might say "the UEA" in English. It's a proper noun so no "la". This is true of pretty much all such initialisms in Esperanto.
"Malfacile" instead of "malfacila". This might take some explaining. The short rule-of-thumb is that for sentence fragments like this where you'd normally use an adjective by itself in English, it will almost always be an adverb by itself in Esperanto, e.g.: "Bonege! Interese! Tre malfacile!". One could logically make a case for either method, but the adverb form is more commonly seen in Esperanto.
You could also make this into a complete sentence in several different ways:
"Tio estis tre malfacila..."
(adjective because tio is a noun)
"Mendi estis tre malfacile..."
(adverb because mendi is a verb)
"Estis tre malfacile mendi..."
(this inverted word order occurs is fairly common for this type of sentence)
"Mi esperas, KE mi ne faris..." because in Esperanto, normally you shouldn't drop conjunctions like we frequently do in English. This may not be an error as such, but an experienced speaker would almost always explicitly say "ke" instead of just implying it. You could also say "Espere mi ne faris...", ("Hopefully I didn't make...")
I don't like "ajn" as a stand-alone adjective, but if you are going to use it as such, it needs to agree with "erarojn", i.e. "ajnajn erarojn". Otherwise use it with "iu" as originally intended, i.e. "iujn ajn erarojn" (meaning "any errors whatsoever"). I just removed it from my "corrected" text though since the English original just says "errors", not "any errors whatsoever".
Hope that helps. ;)
Fantastic! Thank you so much for your help, Trojo. I really appreciate it! Your explanations are very clear and I'm going to make sure to write them down in my practice notebook so that I don't forget them. Unfortunately I always seem to drop the 'ke' and mismatch plurals in nouns and adjectives no matter how hard I try to remember. Hopefully with more practice it will become second nature. :-)
ReplyDeletecheers,
Ali
... Kaj dankon pro via afabla komento, Bill. Mi bedaŭras, ke mi forgesis respondi al vi. Mi ekscitiĝas pri miaj novaj libroj. Mi esperas, ke ili baldaŭ alvenas.
ReplyDeleteOh, also, "menda instrukcioj" has a noun-adjective mismatch. I didn't catch it the first time. And "pro mi" should be "por mi". I did correct and bold this in my earlier post but I didn't comment on it, since I figured it was just a typo.
ReplyDeleteThanks again, Troy. I often get confused between 'pro' and 'por'. I really need to watch my noun-adjective matches too. It wasn't a typo, I'm just really bad at spotting the mismatches I'm embarrassed to say!
ReplyDelete