Talk:Esperanto

Old issues
There are a lot of issue to sort out on this book, before we get going. -- Gabriel Beecham 17:11, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)
 * Firstly, we need to choose a transcription system. Should it be Latin-3, Unicode, X-system... you know the rest...
 * How can we change the content to be more suitable for an Esperanto book? The original version came from the [[Spanish module. On that note, see the Talk:Spanish page.
 * Any suggestions for chapters?
 * Lastly, lets get writing!


 * This wiki is in UTF-8, you can type Unicode straight into it. (Aŭtomata X-konvertado estas starigita ĉe la esperantlingva vikipedio por faciligi la laboron por tiuj, kiuj ne ĝuste agordis sian komputilon por Esperanto, sed ĉi-momente neeblas tiun enŝalti por nura parto de la vikio. Eble iam poste, sed mi havas sufiĉe da laboro kaj restas multe farenda pri lingvoj en la vikisistemo...) --Brion VIBBER 05:40, 26 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * Concerning the chapters, I don't think they are in the best order (and some of them aren't very relevant); for example, Traveling seems rather... inappropriately placed, seeing as what would usually be covered under that (riding taxis, catching flights, etc.) isn't something that is possible to use Esperanto for... Anyways, I was thinking that it would be good to stick in a chapter somewhere concerning describing people, places, etc., rather near the beginning, just to give the readers a basic vocabulary, so they feel like they're actually learning something... --travisg 00:08, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Cxu mi bobe komprenas, ke ni povas komune verki Esperanto-libron, respektive lernolibron? Cxu la x-sistemo ne funkcias en Vikipedio suficxe bone? Mi pensas ke jes. Eble anstataux la libro-titolo "Esperanto" (kiu sonas al mi same kiel "La cxehxa lingvo") estas tro largxa temo. Eble ni devus verki plurajn elektronikajn librojn pri Esperanto, ekz. "Esperanto-lernolibro", "Esperanto-infolibro", "Esperanto-junularo", "Esperanto-enciklopedio"(mi pensas nun pri simila verko, kiu estis presita en 30-aj jaroj kaj iam en 1980 represita), "Esperanto-historio", ... cxu ne? Vikipediisto:Jan


 * Nu jes! Je la unua okulĵeto, ŝajnas al mi ke ĉi tiun paĝaron estas planita kiel lernolibro por anglalingvanoj. Se indas krei apartajn librojn pri specifaj temoj (kaj kompreneble por alilingvanoj), oni certe rajtas tion fari ankaŭ. --Brion VIBBER 05:40, 26 Sep 2003 (UTC)

-

Mi ne volas kritiki, sed rigardante nur la skeleton de la nuna libro, sxajnas al mi iom tro teda - ege similas al similaj libroj, el kiuj jam ekzistas multegaj, ecx sur rete (kelke da artikoloj, vortlistoj, vojagxo ktp ktp). Kial tiu cxi libro estas pli bona/utila? Cxu cxar gxi estos libera? Eble... tamen mi kredas ke indus pripensi cxu ne E-a lernolibro povus esti organizata en alia kaj pli novpensa maniero.

(mi ne regule venos cxi tien, se vi volas respondi, povas ankaux retposxti min al shaklev cxe gmx punkto net).

Stian

Move it over?
Esperanto is a different kind of language, and it serves a different function compared to natural languages such as Spanish. This book should not follow the generic language-learning-book template. That said, I think that this wiki may be the wrong place to start a "Learn Esperanto" book. It might work, but perhaps we should use Esperanto in the way it was intended... by making sure that we have a version in Esperanto to translate to other languages.

There is an Esperanto wikibooks wiki but I am apparently the only real user at the moment. In a fit of entheusiasm, I've gone and started a book there: La Esperanto Komensanta. How's the title?

--Rick MILLER 03:40, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Sorry to nit-pick, but that should be Komencanta. 128.205.219.145 23:17, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Interactive Activities
Hey Everyone --

I posted a link ( http://langwidge.com/esperanto.html ) to some activities I had made to the bottom of the wikibooks. If anyone knows of any way to incorporate them into the actual wikibook you totally have my permission to do so -- they've just been sitting on my hard drive unedited for 5 years now -- I couldn't find any way to use Flash in the WikiBook, though, so I just made a link.

~Ravi

btw, wikibooks would support the interactive activities if they were just sound. If anyone wants to try and make something similar as an ogg file, but didn't have the technical resources/skills, write me: ravip(at)mit(dot)edu

Slang appendix
I believe that would be very useful an appendix about how translate "American" slang to Esperanto.

Dankon

accusative case
In lesson one, you say "the accusative case ... will be covered in the next lesson", but it isn't. &mdash;&mdash; 212.139.34.221 21:29, 28 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Just fixed that. I went into Lesson 1 and put in a section on objects. Though it probably needs some expansion and revision.

DroEsperanto 04:34, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

wordlist?
Shouldn't Appendix C and Appendix D be ROOT lists, after all, you can make English, Englishman, English speaker, and English hater all out of the same root. I know the appendix hasn't been made, but before it is begun, shouldn't have a correct title? --ThrashedParanoid 01:18, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

No one else has said anything about what's going on with the two wordlist appendices, but regardless i have started reformatting them. Since the Esperanto-English appendix is already populated, i'm starting there. First, i am using templates rather than raw tables - which will make it much easier to change the styling if necessary, and allow for consistent styling across the whole book. Second, i have changed the style somewhat because the old style had way too much padding - each entry of the table took up three or four times the vertical space. Third, i have started adding styling to the sections that weren't styled (and were damn near illegible clumps of word soup) and fixed some broken code. i will work my way down the page - it should only take a couple of days - but once it's all done, the whole page will be in a single, regular format which can be easily changed into anything else you like. (Especially by script - just say what you want and i can change the whole list in minutes.) --Indiana (talk) 09:01, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Lesson 4!
Hura! Lesson 4 is up! Though due to laziness, I have yet to add anything on the affectionate suffixes for male and female, nor have I said anything regarding "bo" or "pra". DroEsperanto 23:46, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Amount of grammar
Since Esperanto has a very easy grammar, I don't think we have to introduce it almost all at once. Students get scared away if they have to read through 3 screens full of grammar explanations before they learn how to say anything in a language. When teaching German, French or Russian, it is quite difficult to teach students to say something without having to introduce a lot of grammar at once, particularly in the first lesson, but even that is doable (see my Wikibook BLL German). In Esperanto, it should be no problem at all to write a lesson introducing e. g. just -as and -o (no -n even at first since the word "Accusative" alone will send students of German or Russian running) and to do so in a natural conversation, for example a round of introductions at a congress. Keep in mind that this Wikibook should probably not look like a textbook used during an Esperanto course. Self-study has different demands on material than classroom study. The most crucial difference is that self-study books have to keep the students' motivation up. As soon as something appears too difficult or too boring, many students will stop studying the course or maybe stop studying the language altogether, since they're not at High School where they have to continue taking the class or write exams and they're not working with a private teacher whom they could ask for additional explanations or who could re-motivate them.

I believe the ideal structure for an Esperanto course would be:
 * 1) Text or Dialogue from a situation the student might find himself in (and yes, asking for the way or the like could be part of it, if you imagine a Pasporta Servo kind of situation of an international Esperanto-speaking visitor and a local speaker)
 * 2) Vocabulary
 * 3) Grammar
 * 4) Exercises for grammar and word usage
 * 5) Information about the Esperanto movement
 * 6) Maybe a list of additional vocabulary for those students who would like to have more words to use along the same patterns taught in the lesson. E. g. if the lesson teaches how to say that you're from a particular country, you wouldn't want to put in lots and lots of country names in the main vocabulary list of words that the student will absolutely have to know in the next lesson. Instead, you could put them in an optional vocabulary list, which the student can use to look up the name of his country and any country he is particularly interested in. Part of motivation is also the feeling that you aren't taught anything useless, only commonly-used vocabulary and vocabulary highly relevant to your own situation.

There is a Wikibook about creating good language-teaching Wikibooks, for those interested in more tips for coursebook-writing. And I tried summarising the approach that I found worked best for self-study courses in natural languages in the article Bite-sized language lessons.

Junesun 08:54, 22 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I believe that this would be a great structure to learn ANY language, not solely Esperanto. I would really appreciate it if someone were to add that 'additional vocabulary', since I just started learning Esperanto (like half an hour ago) and feel like the amount vocabulary is out of sink with the grammar (although all this grammar was still easy enough for me) and would like to learn more words to get into sink again. --JorisvS 11:22, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I've already started the first extra vocabulary list in lesson 1, but I need someone to expand it. --JorisvS 11:34, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
 * To address JorisvS point - I need to have a good read of all this. I take the line below, but you do need some basic bits and pieces to make up sentences with.Stevebritgimp 19:51, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Personally I disagree on the main point (in the gentlest possible way). The point of Esperanto is that it has an entirely regular grammar, and so grammar is easy to learn. If I were teaching Esperanto to a small group of people I would almost immediately talk about, say, the tenses - past and future. Now if you were learning French in school you wouldn't do tenses until the second year, or at least quite a few weeks or months down the line. I do very much agree that using the grammatical terms for things (like accusative) while fine on talk, should be avoided in lessons - in fact accusative itself is a mistake by Latin grammarians. Best use 'object'.

Following on from that I think the classic 'phrasebook' or 'expressions' approach is not ideal for Esperanto, given that it is international and don't have idiom.

A lot to discuss - I wonder if this is something that floats people's boat - Esperanto's great strength is its simplicity and that it illustrates how other languages work. Stevebritgimp 19:49, 27 December 2006 (UTC) P.S. Anyone encountered Michel Thomas' approach to teaching languages? Stevebritgimp 19:51, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Venturo or veturo?
It says in lesson 10: ŝip- (ship) + ventur (travel) = ŝip(o)veturo (a journey by ship) This doesn't look correct. What is there correct translation of 'a journey' in Esperanto? --JorisvS 15:05, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

False Friends
Oh my gosh! What happened to the section on False Friends?! It looks like it was deleted, and right when I was about to learn from it! Why was it deleted? What can be done/what should I do?--Gabriel Koulikov 20:06, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Esperanto Wikiversity course
The Wikiversity course is very bare and needs further development. Right now it just has links to the standard e-mail course but not much else. If anyone could help develop it that would be greatly apreciated. The link is here: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introductory_Esperanto#.5B.5BPortal:Learning_Materials.7CLearning_materials.5D.5D

Thanks

Add some flare!
I was thinking, why not add a welcome page and some nice graphics, similar to Spanish and German? I think that a good first impression will make learning from this wikibook easier. Sandman85048 21:49, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Merge introduction
The introduction section is in all these tiny little bits.. why not just put them in one page and set up redirects? Sandman85048 23:02, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Translated navigation???
This book is intended to be for English speakers (anything else belongs in other language versions of Wikibooks) who don't know any Esperanto yet and wish to learn it. Hence, we can't have the navigation in Esperanto, because they won't understand it and will leave these pages discouraged from learning Esperanto. Not to mention that with the current translations, Esperanto speakers won't easily understand the items either... Junesun 18:38, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

That's a good idea, my friend. Japanese is difficult enough for me to learn; since I'm now tackling an artificial language, baby steps are necessary here. --74.130.244.188 (talk) 21:53, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Renaming pages
The manual of style frowns on naming pages as we have done here. I am going to go through renaming all "lesson" and "appendix" pages properly. All "lesson" pages are going to be renamed from, for example, Esperanto/Lesson 1 to Esperanto/Introducing yourself (with English titles like "Introducing yourself" rather than Esperanto ones like "Enkonduko" because this is the English Wikibooks) - and then I will turn Esperanto/Lesson 1 into a redirect to Esperanto/Introducing yourself. All "appendix" pages are going to be renamed from, for example, Esperanto/Appendix A to Esperanto/Appendix/Esperanto alphabet and pronunciation, along with a redirect. This is the total list of changes I will make:


 * Lessons
 * Lesson 1 → Introducing yourself
 * <tt>Lesson 2</tt> → <tt>Travelling</tt>
 * <tt>Lesson 3</tt> → <tt>Recreational activities</tt>
 * <tt>Lesson 4</tt> → <tt>Family</tt>
 * <tt>Lesson 5</tt> → <tt>School</tt>
 * <tt>Lesson 6</tt> → <tt>Shopping</tt>
 * <tt>Lesson 7</tt> → <tt>Household</tt>
 * <tt>Lesson 8</tt> → <tt>Esperanto culture</tt>
 * <tt>Lesson 9</tt> → <tt>World Congress</tt>
 * <tt>Lesson 10</tt> → <tt>Word synthesis</tt>
 * Appendices
 * <tt>Appendix A</tt> → <tt>Appendix/Alphabet and pronunciation</tt>
 * <tt>Appendix B</tt> → <tt>Appendix/Solutions to exercises</tt>
 * <tt>Appendix C</tt> → <tt>Appendix/English-Esperanto word list</tt>
 * <tt>Appendix D</tt> → <tt>Appendix/Esperanto-English word list</tt>
 * <tt>Appendix E</tt> → <tt>Appendix/Abbreviations</tt>
 * <tt>Appendix F</tt> → <tt>Appendix/Summary of grammar</tt>
 * <tt>Appendix G</tt> → <tt>Appendix/Web resources</tt>
 * <tt>Appendix H</tt> → <tt>Appendix/Table of correlatives</tt>
 * <tt>Appendix I</tt> → <tt>Appendix/Table of word endings</tt>
 * <tt>Appendix J</tt> → <tt>Appendix/Table of affixes</tt>
 * <tt>Appendix K</tt> → <tt>Appendix/False friends</tt>
 * <tt>Appendix L</tt> → <tt>Appendix/Slang</tt>
 * <tt>Appendix M</tt> → <tt>Appendix/Common phrases</tt>

The reasons for this, other than better conformance to the Wikibooks manual of style, should be painfully obvious I think. Lessons and appendices will be easy to add, remove and shuffle around (and clearly some shuffling is needed - why is "World Congress" a lesson? Are we going to be tested on it? "Esperanto culture" and "World Congress" should probably come after the lessons, after the language is taught and now you're discussing the culture). I'll be making this change sometime in February probably, or maybe March - unless I get a lot of negative feedback before then. --Indiana (talk) 21:08, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Sounds like a good idea. --Yair rand (talk) 21:15, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Move worksheets to Wikiversity?
What do people think of the possibility of moving the worksheet-like sections to Wikiversity, and linking to them from within the appropriate section in the Wikibook? For example, we could remove the Exercise : Translation section from the first lesson, add something like this to Wikiversity, and link to that from the first lesson. --Yair rand (talk) 23:49, 18 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I think that's a great idea. Once I finish souping up the appendices, I intend to start on the lessons themselves, and I did intend to trim out the exercises. But if this textbook could have an associated course on Wikiversity, that would be even better. Would you like to talk about a lesson plan? I mean, not right away because I have to finish with the appendices first, but eventually we'll need a plan for the lessons - right now they're organized based on some other language textbook, but that's not really appropriate for Esperanto (when are you ever going to need to buy a plane ticket in Esperanto?). It would be cool if we could figure out a workable lesson plan for the Wikibook, and have exercises and lessons mirrored in Wikiversity, so that while either could stand alone, they work even better together. --Indiana (talk) 18:14, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Book layout
I have created a manual of style for this Wikibook (feel free to discuss that there). As I mentioned there, I think we need to talk about how to organize the main body of this book (thus far, all of my work has been souping up the appendices, which I will continue to do, of course). What should the book's layout be (Are we going to have a preface? A brief grammar intro before the in depth lessons?)? What should the lessons be like (How should grammar elements be introduced, and in what order? Should there be a consistent story to keep readers engaged, or isolated dialogues?)? --Indiana (talk) 03:51, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Rewrite
I'm working on a rewrite of this wikibook, as it has been incomplete for several years. I plan to present topics in this order. Feel free to suggest a different order.


 * Lesson 1
 * Nouns
 * Adjectives
 * Adverbs
 * Personal and possessive pronouns
 * Direct and indirect objects
 * Prepositional phrases
 * Lesson 2
 * Infinitive
 * Simple tenses/Active Voice
 * Conditional mood
 * Imperative mood
 * Active and passive participles
 * Questions
 * Lesson 3
 * Correlatives
 * Participles as adverbs and nouns
 * Lesson 4
 * Word building with affixes
 * Compound words
 * Changing part of speech
 * Lesson 5
 * Complex tenses formed with participles

20:01, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

I can only say that I strongly support your idea! --Leefeni,de Karik (discuss • contribs) 22:08, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Dialogues
I'm thinking about creating a session only for small talk in Esperanto, and this is the first one I've made. I think you could help with more.


 * Esperanto/Dialogues/Bus stop

--Leefeni,de Karik (discuss • contribs) 22:08, 8 December 2011 (UTC)


 * I just added a section (in outline form) for Esperanto and electronic communication. This is a place to cover SMS texts, Tweets, and Email as translation exercises&mdash;both into and out of EO. I think it's an excellent place to cover slang various abbreviation.

I should mention, the bus stop dialogues are good, they should be integrated into the book. Wikijeff (discuss • contribs) 01:09, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Growing beyond the book format
My name is Ian and I'm from a project called Wikiotics, where we build free software tools for language instruction. We are starting to build collections of interactive language lessons that can serve as textbook replacements for students and this we would love for the Esperanto community to be represented.

If there is anyone here who is interested in expanding this content beyond a traditional text-based book format or who would like to incorporate interactive lessons we build based on the outline of this book, just chime in here or contact us at contact AT wikiotics DOT org or in irc at #wikiotics on freenode.

As example of the kind of new materials you can make with our tools, here are examples our current lesson types:
 * Picture choice lesson (http://wikiotics.org/en/Introduction),
 * Re-mixable Podcast (http://wikiotics.org/user/ian/FSI-Mandarin-Module01-Unit01),
 * Text multiple choice lesson (http://wikiotics.org/en/WANY_Hospital_grammar)
 * new Storybook lesson [coming soon](http://laurent.dev.wikiotics.net/en/storybook1).

Wikiotics (discuss • contribs) 19:53, 13 June 2012 (UTC)