Esperanto · Chapter 9 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
Reported speech and tense
Li diris, ke li venos - Esperanto keeps the tense of the original words, where English shifts them back. Simpler than English, and therefore easy to get wrong.
The short version
Esperanto never backshifts
Somebody said mi venos, so you report li diris, ke li venos. English drags a reported present into the past and a reported past further back still; Esperanto quotes the tense the speaker actually used. The rule is simpler than the English one and the habit is harder, because would tempts you straight into -us. But li diris, ke li venus means he said he would come if something else happened, which is a different claim entirely.
Li diris, ke li venos.
Reported questions take ĉu, reported orders take -u
A yes-or-no question inside a sentence uses ĉu, never se and never ke: li demandis, ĉu mi venos. A ki- question keeps its ordinary correlative and needs no re-ordering, because Esperanto never inverted the direct question in the first place: ŝi demandis, kie mi loĝas. And a reported command or request takes the volitive inside the ke-clause: la patrino diris, ke la knabo dormu.
Li demandis, ĉu mi venos.
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 readPractice
Practise this lesson
15-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end.
Esperanto · Free printables
Worksheets for this lesson
Worksheets with answer keys built in. Open any one to view, print or save.
Free for members
The printable worksheets, infographics and PDFs are free with an account. Start a free week and download as many as you like.
Start your free weekLesson 14 of 23 in this chapter