Kilo Lingo

Esperanto · Chapter 27 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer

How to actually type Esperanto

The Windows advice everyone gives is wrong - what genuinely produces cx gx hx jx sx ux on every OS, the x-system as an input convention, autocorrect sabotage, and spelling aloud with bo, co, cxo.

The short version

The Windows advice everyone gives is wrong

US-International keyboard produces none of the six hatted letters - its circumflex dead key covers vowels only, and Windows ships no Esperanto layout at all. The thing that actually works today is PowerToys Quick Accent, which has Esperanto built in and covers all six. If you tried the standard advice and failed, the fault was never yours.

cx gx hx jx sx ux -> cx here means the x-system

the six letters, and the ASCII convention that stands in for them

Spell it aloud: a, bo, co, cxo

Esperanto letter names are the vowels bare and every consonant plus o: bo, co, cxo, do. The o is a pronunciation helper, not a noun ending - so the plural of the letter b is b-oj, not boj. Spell your name down a phone line with them and you will be understood in forty countries.

Kiel oni literumas vian nomon?

How does one spell your name?

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 · 15 min read

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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 8 of 22 in this chapter

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