Kilo Lingo

Ch 1 · Lesson 2

The alphabet: 28 letters, one sound each

The six hatted letters, how to type them when your keyboard cannot, and the stress rule that never has an exception. Ten minutes, and you can pronounce every word in the language.

The short version

One letter, one sound, no exceptions

- a--ko; -

friend; Esperanto - stress the next-to-last syllable
Why?

Every Esperanto letter makes exactly one sound, and every sound has exactly one letter, so you can read aloud a word you have never seen and be right. Stress is just as fixed: always the next-to-last syllable, in every word in the language.

No hats on your keyboard? Use x

cxu = the hatted c-word questions; ankaux = also

the x stands in for the hat, never for a sound
Why?

Six letters wear hats: cx gx hx jx sx ux is how you type cxu, gxi and sxi when your keyboard cannot make them. It is unambiguous because x is not a letter of the Esperanto alphabet at all - which is exactly why the convention chose it.

The letters worth a warning

Letter IPA Sounds like
c/ts/"ts" as in cats. Never "k", never "s".
ĉ/tʃ/"ch" as in church.
ĝ/dʒ/"j" as in jam.
ĥ/x/Scottish loch. The rarest letter in the language; clear your throat with confidence.
ĵ/ʒ/"s" as in measure.
ŝ/ʃ/"sh" as in ship.
ŭ/w/"w", and only ever after a or e: aŭ, eŭ.
a e i o u/a e i o u/Pure vowels, as in Spanish: ah, eh, ee, oh, oo. No drifting off into diphthongs; an Esperanto o stays where you put it.
The circumflexes are not accents doing something mysterious to the letter underneath: ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and ŭ are letters in their own right, each with the one fixed sound above. Esperanto is fully phonetic, so this is not a list of exceptions - it is the entire inventory of surprises, and you have now had all of them.

That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.

Read the full article · 6 min read

Practice

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10-question session

One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 16 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.

Esperanto · Free printables

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Lesson 2 of 51 in this chapter

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