Esperanto-USA

I'm just chiming in to announce to anyone who was unaware of this fact that there are several old-but-useful Esperanto books available for free through Google-Books.

All you have to do is go to GoogleBooks, do advanced book search, put "Esperanto" as your keyword. Choose your native language--ideally, English and select "Full View Only" then search. I get over 600 hits.

It seems like all the books are available for download in PDF format or you can view them in text-only format and copy and paste.

D. Gary Grady is Vice President of the American Association of Teachers of Esperanto (AATE). He lives in Durham, NC.
dgary cxe mindspring punkto com

At some point after we start learning Esperanto, we begin to notice things that make the language seem harder than it needs to be. For example:

Ni komencis la kunvenon, kaj la kunveno komenciĝis.

Mi boligis la akvon, kaj la akvo bolis.

Why say komenci in one place and komenciĝi in the other? And why does boli work differently?

The usual explanation is that komenci is transitive and boli is intransitive, and to use komenci intransitively or boli transitively requires a suffix. Even if students remember what “transitive” and “intransitive” mean, they’re left with the impression that the transitivity of Esperanto verbs is something like the gender of French nouns: a more or less arbitrary attribute that unfortunately has to be looked up in a dictionary and committed to memory.

And Esperanto is supposed to be easy?

D. Gary Grady is Vice President of the American Association of Teachers of Esperanto (AATE). He lives in Durham, NC.
dgary cxe mindspring punkto com

When I was in college I let myself be talked into jumping directly into an upper level course in conversational French. Once I realized that everyone else in the class was much more fluent, I barely spoke at all for fear of making embarrassing mistakes.

But then some years after college I met someone who was learning French, and he and I had no trouble carrying on a limited conversation in French (with some English and a fair number of hand gestures mixed in). I’m sure a real French speaker would have been horrified, but we had a grand time and managed to communicate pretty well.

The Esperanto club at University of Illinois has been going rather swimmingly. Total, there's about 12 people who actually come to meetings, though there's been some definite interest so I imagine more will be coming soon. That's more than I expected in such a short time with so little publicity.

Lee Miller
lamiller cxe centurytel punkto net

Tim Westover
timwestover cxe yahoo punkto com

Dankon pro via entuziasmo pri la nova traduk-rubriko. Ni ricevis sep tradukojn, el kiuj ses meritis legadon kaj pensadon. Unu estis ne precize en Esperanto, sed en iu reformita lingvo “Esperanto 20000”. Pri ĝi ni vere scias nenion, sed ni klarigu: la celo de la rubriko estas tradukado en Esperanton, ne en aliajn lingvojn. Bedaŭrinde ni ne povas eĉ taksi tiun ĉi provon, do ĝi ne rolas en nia diskuto.

Ni dankas al H.F., C.E.O., S.N., G.B., R.T., kaj S.L. kiuj sendis bonajn tradukojn de la teksto:

“I knew a woman that was so dexterous with a fellow, who indeed deserved no better usage, that while he was busy with her another way, conveyed his purse with twenty guineas in it out of his fobpocket, where he had put it for fear of her, and put another purse with gilded counters in it into the room of it. After he had done he says to her, ‘Now han’t you picked my pocket?’ She jested with him, and told him she supposed he had not much to lose; he put his hand to his fob, and with his fingers felt that his purse was there, which fully satisfied him, and so she brought off his money. And this was a trade with her; she kept a sham gold watch and a purse of counters in her pocket to be ready on all such occasions, and I doubt not practised it with success.” (el Moll Flanders de Daniel Defoe)

D. Gary Grady is Vice President of the American Association of Teachers of Esperanto (AATE). He lives in Durham, NC.
dgary cxe mindspring punkto com

Building up a vocabulary is a major part of mastering a language—quite possibly the major part in terms of time and effort expended. So it’s worth trying to find the best and most efficient way to teach (and learn) new words, ideally so they’ll be remembered weeks, months or years later.

Let’s try an experiment. I’m going to pick a couple of relatively uncommon Esperanto words you might not know and ask you to keep them in mind: boaco (reindeer) and luko (skylight, porthole). If you already happen to know those words, pick a couple of others at random.

Sometimes a word is so similar to its English equivalent that learning is no effort (provided it really does mean the same thing as its equivalent and isn’t a “false friend”). Other times there’s a mnemonic trick you can use. Montagu Butler suggests a number of them in his classic Step by Step in Esperanto (“A bee! Lo!” for abelo, for example.) But for the most part we have to rely on plain old memory.

Fujii Yumiko

George Baker

La japana senrjuo estas mallonga parolstila poemo farita el 17 silaboj, sen la sezonvorto de la hajko. Ĝin karakterizas simpleco, humuro, komikeco kaj sprito. Ĝi populariĝis dum la erao Edo (1603~1867), kaj ricevis sian nomon de la fama poeto Karai Senryu.

Komenciĝis en 1987 la Daiichi Seimei Sarariiman Senryu Konkuru (Daiichi Seimei-a Salajrula Senrjua Konkurso) fare de la asekura kompanio Daiichi Seimei. Reflektante la socian staton de la salajrulo, la temo plejparte prezentas lian amaran vivon kaj edziĝon kun humoro kaj ironio.

Sekvas poemaro tirita el poemoj varbitaj de la konkurso. Ĉiun poemon sekvas la kromnomo de la autoro.

LA EDZINO

1. 痩せるツボ   脂肪が邪魔し    探せない
   Neeblas trovi
   prempunkton por dieti
   pro ŝia grasec’.
    —Yukinokonohitorigoto

D. Gary Grady is Vice President of the American Association of Teachers of Esperanto (AATE). He lives in Durham, NC.
dgary cxe mindspring punkto com

At meetings of clubs, civic groups, and churches, at science fiction conventions, in fact any time organizers have a need for talks and presentations to entertain and inform their members, you have an opportunity to introduce Esperanto.

A common approach is to give a talk about Esperanto—what it is, why to learn it, and so on—but an interesting alternative is to dive right into teaching the language. Dennis Keefe’s article in the latest issue of Internacia Pedagogia Revuo* makes some useful suggestions for doing this.

In designing a one-session micro-course it’s important to take into account the varying interest levels of your audience and the fact that they haven't (yet) signed up for Lesson Two. Ideally, the lesson should be as fun and entertaining as possible, bearing in mind the likely diversity of participants. It helps to cover a number of topics: a little about pronunciation, a little about grammar, a few useful phrases, etc.

You may notice a new line under each posting on our website that let's you "watch" posts. If you click on this line, you can start "watching" a post. What does this mean? It's cool! But to really take advantage of this, however, you may want to set some preferences in your account settings. Read on for more.

The North American Summer Esperanto Course (NASK) is June 29th to July 17th, 2009, in sunny San Diego, CA!

There's a beautiful, informative new website available with tons of great information about the program:

http://esperanto.org/nask/

I hope you'll seriously consider making the trip to California for NASK. It's a considerable investment - in time, money, energy - but the rewards are even greater.