The Hardest Thing (So Far) With Esperanto

Okay, so up until this point it's been really easy. I haven't really struggled with anything in particular, and it's all been really simple. Until I started Kurso de Esperanto - Leciono 5 (Esperanto Course lesson 5). It's about correlatives.
Now if you're like me, you might not even know what a correlative is at first. That's not really too important, but it seems like it makes it easier to learn the stuff if you actually know what it is. Anyway, a correlative is basically a word that correlates 2 other words together (hence the name, I suppose. I probably should have figured that out). So words like "who," "where," "that," and also words like "someone," "nobody," and so on.
It's not too tricky to remember what they are, but there are so many of them! There are 5 base words, that can each have endings:
ki- (question or relative clause ["where", "who,"....])
ti- (indicate or point ["those", "that", ...])
i- (something indefinite ["any," "some"])
neni- (negativeness or non-existence)
cxi- (indicates all members of a group)

Now, after those bases we put on an ending. Here they are:
-e (location)
-am (time)
-o (general object, thing, or concept)
-u (particular person or thing)

Four endings times five bases is twenty correlatives. TWENTY! It's not really that much though, but even when I break it down into learning the 5 bases and 4 endings, that's still 9 things to remember.
And that's not all. Because of the design of Esperanto, words receive further endings if they are plural or "accusative" (the OBJECT of the sentence [Ickathu wrote this POST]). But not all of them can receive the endings. If it ends in -o (general thing), it can receive the plural ending (j), but not the object ending (n). If it ends in "a" or "u", it can receive both the plural j and the accusative n.

That's not it though. There are more ki- endings. I'm not sure if these endings can also be used on the other "base" words. If you know, can you leave a comment telling me? I think these are specific for ki- though.
kia (what kind/type)
kiel (how)
kies (whose)
kiom (how many/much)
kial (why)

As you can see, it's quite a bit.
And even if I can understand what they mean (able to translate from Esperanto to English), I find it extremely challenging to do it the other way (from English into Esperanto). Even the easiest languages have challenges. Still, I'm not going to let this stop me. I'm going to make some mnemonics for all of these tomorrow, since I'm practically falling asleep while I type this post. I hope it's coherent.

Mi vidos en la mateno!!

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If you have any questions, comments, critiques, requests, etc., then please, feel free to leave a comment below and I'll be sure to respond as soon as possible!
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Attempts to Speak after 2 Days of Esperanto

So I've been doing Esperanto for two days now! I know it's not very much, but I've already chatted (over text) with some people in Esperanto. I'm finding it easy to understand what they say to me, probably due to the similarities between Esperanto and English, but I need to use a dictionary for a lot of the things I try to say. I'm trying to find some people on Skype that I can practice Esperanto with also, but so far I've had no such luck.

Anyway, I'm really pleased with the little bit of progress that I've made in just these two days. I've been working on it a lot. Seriously. I'm doing three courses on memrise, working through a course and chatting with others on lernu.net, and plowing through Kurso de Esperanto, which lets me get personal feedback from an instructor.

I have to say, Esperanto is really easy. The grammar is (practically) non-existent, so I took about 2 minutes to read through what the different word endings referred to, and now I've completely finished my grammar study of Esperanto.
The vocabulary is very easy to learn. Most of the words are similar to their corresponding word in English, and for the ones that aren't, I've been creating a mnemonic image to help remember them.

I think that's all I have to say for now!
Mi vidos vin! Ĝis!

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If you enjoyed this post, make sure to check out my other blog!
If you have any questions, comments, critiques, requests, etc., then please, feel free to leave a comment below and I'll be sure to respond as soon as possible!
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My Goal

"Esperanto in 2 weeks? What does that mean?! Is this guy really trying to learn a language in 2 weeks? He must be some kind of savant!!"

Yes. I'm trying to see how much Esperanto I can learn in the next 2 weeks. I'm starting today (June 17, 2013), and I'll be ending on the last day of June (June 30, 2013). I've studied Esperanto before, but that was 2 and a half years ago, and I've forgotten everything (except a few words like "Amiko" (friend)). No, I'm not a savant, and no, I don't speak any languages fluently besides English. I've been learning Spanish for a few months, and although I can converse at an okay level, I'm nowhere near fluent.
Read more here: http://everythingickathu.blogspot.com/2013/06/Esperanto-in-2-weeks.html

So let's see how this goes!!

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If you enjoyed this post, make sure to check out my other blog!
If you have any questions, comments, critiques, requests, etc., then please, feel free to leave a comment below and I'll be sure to respond as soon as possible!
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