Esperanto · Chapter 1 · Lesson 6 · Grammar primer
Esperanto word endings: -o, -a, -e, -i
Every word tells you its own part of speech. Learn four letters and you can parse a sentence before you can translate it.
The short version
Four letters tell you the part of speech
Every Esperanto word ends in a letter that says what kind of word it is, with no exceptions anywhere in the language. A noun ends -o, an adjective -a, a derived adverb -e, an infinitive verb -i. That means you can work out the structure of a sentence before you know what a single root means, which is not something any natural language lets you do.
Bona homo parolas bone.
-a describes a noun, -e describes everything else
This is the one place beginners hesitate, and the rule is short. If the word is describing a noun, it takes -a: bona homo, a good person. If it is describing anything else at all, a verb, an adjective or a whole clause, it takes -e: bone paroli, to speak well. English marks roughly the same split with -ly, so the instinct is already there.
Ŝi parolas bone.
One root gives you the whole family free
Because the ending carries the part of speech, the root never has to change to move between them. Learn bon- and you have bona, bono, bone and boni without learning anything else. English needs good, goodness and well, three unrelated shapes for one idea. This is the real reason a 200-root Esperanto course is not a 200-word course.
bona, bono, bone, boni
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.
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