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Esperanto Example Sentences: 48 Real Sentences, Graded by Frequency

48 Esperanto example sentences with English translations, graded from your first fifty words to the core 1,000, plus how to read any Esperanto sentence and a Zamenhof sample text.

By Michael McGettrick5 Sept 202627 min read

Esperanto Example Sentences

Most pages answering this query offer ten phrasebook lines and a shrug. Here are 48 real Esperanto example sentences with English translations, taken verbatim from the dictionary pages of our 1,000-word Esperanto course, and graded the way the course itself is: by word frequency. The first group uses only words from your first fifty; the last group draws on the full core 1,000. Every Esperanto word below links to its own dictionary page, where you will find its meaning, more example sentences and recorded audio in two accents.

If you want the language explained rather than sampled, start with why Esperanto is worth learning and how easy it actually is. If you want to say things rather than read them, the basic Esperanto phrases page covers greetings and courtesies, and the numbers page covers counting.

How to read an Esperanto sentence

You can parse any sentence on this page cold, because Esperanto words declare their jobs. Five endings do almost all of the work:

  • -o marks a noun: vorto is word, domo is house.
  • -a marks an adjective: bona is good.
  • -e marks an adverb: bone is well.
  • -as, -is, -os mark a verb in the present, past and future. Every verb, no exceptions, including to be.
  • -n marks the direct object, and -j marks a plural.

So in Mi vidas la grandan domon, the -as tells you vidas is a present-tense verb, the -n on grandan domon tells you the big house is what gets seen, and no dictionary was harmed. The full tour of the endings is in word endings: the vowel system, and the object marker gets its own article, the accusative, because it is the one piece of machinery English speakers have to actually practise.

One consequence worth knowing before you read on: because -n marks the object wherever it sits, word order is flexible, and Esperanto uses that freedom for emphasis rather than chaos. You will see it exploited in the very first group below.

Sentences from your first fifty words

Frequency-first learning makes big promises, so here is the receipt. Every sentence in this group is built entirely from the fifty commonest words in the language, which is roughly your first two lessons:

  • Kiu vi estas? - Who are you?
  • Tio estas por vi. - That is for you.
  • Ŝi diris tion al mi. - She said that to me.
  • Ne mi, sed li diris tion. - Not I, but he said that.
  • Ĉu vi estos kun ni? - Will you be with us?
  • Kio estas tio? - What is that?
  • Kion vi faras nun? - What are you doing now?
  • Nur vi povas fari tion. - Only you can do that.
  • Per kio vi faris tion? - What did you do that with?
  • Kion oni faru? - What is one to do?

Three things to notice already. Questions need no do-support and no inversion: ĉu in front of a statement makes it a yes-no question, done. Ne mi, sed li diris tion shows the emphasis trick: the word order bends because the endings, not the positions, carry the grammar. And faru is the imperative-ish u-form doing in one syllable what English needs "is one to do" for.

Sentences from the top 100 words

  • Tio ne estas bona. - That is not good.
  • Ĉu vi povas vidi min? - Can you see me?
  • Vi ne devas fari tion. - You do not have to do that.
  • Ŝi estas la plej bona. - She is the best.
  • Kion vi volas? - What do you want?
  • Ĉu vi scias, kiu li estas? - Do you know who he is?
  • Ĉiuj homoj volas vivi. - All people want to live.
  • Mi scias, ke vi venos. - I know that you will come.
  • Vi scias pli ol mi. - You know more than I do.
  • Mi devas iri nun. - I must go now.
  • Mi volas scii pli pri via lingvo. - I want to know more about your language.
  • La vero estas en niaj manoj. - The truth is in our hands.

By word 100 you have modality (povas, devas, volas), comparison (pli ol, plej) and subordinate clauses (ke vi venos). Notice what you have not had to learn: not one irregular form, and no conjugation tables, because venos is the future of every person at once.

Sentences from the top 500 words

Two sentences here are quietly teaching the accusative's party tricks. Li venas ĉiun tagon uses -n on a time expression, no preposition needed. And Ŝi iris en la domon is the accusative of direction: en la domo would mean she walked around inside the house, while en la domon means she went in. One letter, and it is the difference between motion towards and location. The accusative article unpacks both.

Sentences from the full core 1,000

This is where the word-building system starts earning its keep. Sciigi is scii (to know) plus -ig- (to cause): to make known. Troviĝis is trovi (to find) plus -iĝ-: found itself, there was. Kompatinda is kompati (to pity) plus -ind- (worthy of): pitiable, poor thing. None of these needed their own dictionary entry in your head; they are known roots wearing affixes. A thousand roots run a long way when each one multiplies.

An Esperanto sample text, from Zamenhof himself

Example sentences show you the machinery; a text shows you the language walking. Here is the first stanza of La Espero (The Hope), the poem L. L. Zamenhof published in 1890 that became the Esperanto anthem. Zamenhof died in 1917, so it is comfortably in the public domain:

En la mondon venis nova sento,

tra la mondo iras forta voko;

per flugiloj de facila vento

nun de loko flugu ĝi al loko.

Into the world came a new feeling; through the world goes a strong call; on wings of an easy wind, let it now fly from place to place.

Even here the endings do their work in plain sight: en la mondon with -n is motion into the world, while tra la mondo without it is location, the same one-letter distinction you met in Ŝi iris en la domon above. If you want more Zamenhof at sentence length, his Proverbaro Esperanta collects 2,600 public-domain proverbs, and a proverb is an example sentence with survival instincts.

Where to go after example sentences

Single sentences are scaffolding. The next step is connected text you can actually read, which is what our ten graded Esperanto stories are for: every story is written entirely within the core 1,000 words, so the vocabulary ceiling is a promise rather than a hope. Every word in the course also has its own page in our Esperanto dictionary, with audio, so any sentence above can be unpacked word by word.

And if these 48 sentences have made the language look suspiciously simple, that is because it is. Esperanto was engineered so that 150 to 200 hours buys what 600 buys elsewhere, and the free course teaches the 1,000 words these sentences are built from, in exactly the frequency order this page graded them by.

Frequently asked

What does an Esperanto sentence look like?

Like this: Mi volas vidi la mondon, meaning I want to see the world. Esperanto sentences are built from invariable roots plus endings that declare each word's job: -o for a noun (mondo, world), -a for an adjective, -as for a present-tense verb (volas, want), -i for an infinitive (vidi, to see), and -n to mark the direct object (mondon). Because the endings carry the structure, you can parse any sentence on sight once you know five suffixes.

Is Esperanto word order free?

Freer than English, not lawless. Because the -n ending marks the object wherever it stands, La knabo vidas la hundon and La hundon vidas la knabo both mean the boy sees the dog, and speakers exploit that for emphasis, as in Ne mi, sed li diris tion: not I, but he said that. In practice most Esperanto prose runs subject-verb-object, and beginners should too.

Where can I find Esperanto text samples?

The classic public-domain sample is the first stanza of Zamenhof's poem La Espero, quoted with translation on this page. For longer reading, Zamenhof's Proverbaro Esperanta (1910) offers 2,600 proverbs, and our ten graded Esperanto stories are written entirely within the core 1,000 words, so they are readable much earlier than authentic literature.

How many Esperanto sentences do I need to learn?

None by heart, which is the point of a regular language. Instead of memorising sentences, you learn the small set of endings that generate them: once -as, -is and -os mark present, past and future on every verb without exception, any sentence you can say in the present you can say in the past for free. Read enough graded examples to internalise the patterns, then let the 16 rules do the multiplying.