tendaro

Decode it and smile. Tendaro is tendo, a tent, plus -ar-, the suffix for a collection of the same thing. A camp is a lot of tents. That is the whole word, and you were able to read it before you met it, which is the entire promise of Esperanto delivered in eight letters.

The -ar- family is the one worth memorising. Arbo a tree gives arbaro a forest. Vorto a word gives vortaro a dictionary. Homo a person gives homaro humanity. Ŝtupo a step gives ŝtuparo a staircase. Once you have the pattern, a whole shelf of English nouns you would otherwise have to learn one by one falls out of roots you already own.

The camp is a real place in this language. Esperanto has held youth camps since the movement was young: the Internacia Junulara Kongreso puts one on every summer, national associations run their own, and a kongresa tendaro is the cheap accommodation option beside the conference hall. "Mi renkontis ilin en tendaro" is a sentence with a specific social meaning to an Esperantist, and it is not the same meaning as a military militista tendaro.

It has a story to itself. La tendaro is the milestone reader that goes with this stretch of the course. Chapter 20's La vulpo already put a single tendo on a dry field at the edge of the woods, with a fox and a stolen lump of butter; this one puts up several of them and adds the people.