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Esperanto · Chapter 23 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer

The Esperanto bookshelf, in reading order

Graded readers to Gerda malaperis, Piron to Kabe's La Faraono, Baghy and Kazohinio, Auld's La infana raso - what to read at each level and where to get it.

The short version

Start with Gerda malaperis

Claude Piron wrote Gerda malaperis as a detective story that begins with a 300-word vocabulary and grows chapter by chapter - the whole community learned from it and it still works. Graded reading is how Esperanto is meant to be learned: our own stories use the same trick, each one capped to the vocabulary you already have.

Gerda malaperis!

Gerda disappeared! - the most famous sentence in Esperanto teaching.

The translation that set the standard

Kabe translated La Faraono in 1907 and set the prose standard the language still measures itself against - then quit the movement without a word in 1911, giving Esperanto its best verb (kabei) and its best cautionary tale in one career. Read it when you reach the advanced shelf; the style has not aged.

La Faraono, tradukita de Kabe, 1907.

The Pharaoh, translated by Kabe, 1907.

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 · 14 min read

Practice

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45-question session

One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end.

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Lesson 14 of 22 in this chapter

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