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- "He or she is good."
"He or she is good."
Translation:Li aŭ ŝi estas bona.
38 Comments
Li aux sxi estas bona!
If you don't know how to type those latters, you just have to do it like that and no more! Duolingo should acept it!
I really hope it gets fixed when it's out of beta, I'm so used to the x and it's gonna be very troublesome to click those little circles all the time.
At least they're usually 'acceptable errors'. If they were marked wrong, that would be a real problem.
If youre on a phone, just download the google keyboard. It has an esperanto dictionary that you can switch to.
It accepts au si though, just don't type x.
By the way, what is the difference between u and ux - I mean that u with the thing above?
Esperanto has ŭ for the w like sound. ux and ŭ are the same. When you're typing and don't have an Esperanto keyboard layout, then you can use the letter with an x following it, as in the following: cx, gx, hx, jx, sx and ux.
OK, I guess I just need more examples with ŭ and I will see the difference :)
"Li aŭ ŝi bona estas" is correct, but unusual. Word order is very flexible in Esperanto, but that word order is unusual enough that the course didn't accept it. "Bona estas li aŭ ŝi" would also be correct, but you'd be more likely to find it in poetry than in course for beginners.
In Esperanto, word order is flexible, but it does still have it's limits.
Certain words must be adjacent, but can be in either order.
My guess is that estas should be adjacent to one or more of the pronouns it is relevant to?
After some research, I think that it has to do with what type of adjective this is, and in this case is a predicate adjective. Predicate adjectives (eg "La knabo estas bona.") always seem to follow the verb as it could otherwise be confused with an attribute adjective (eg "La bona knabo." aŭ "La knabo bona"). In my version of the sentence, bona would be translated as "good she", which in this case is clearly wrong.
It might be good, being forced to practice with the bubbles.
In Swedish there's a bunch of little accents, and not until recently I would just type the normal form of the letter (without the accents) which makes it harder to remember which word has the accents. And being that accents can change the entire definition of the word....
The second I see those damn diacritics is the second I go back to French. Sorry Esperanto, you lost your one advantage! Typing Japanese is easier! 日本語の方がエスペラントより簡単の言語ですよ。
Not that I'm complaining, but these Basics sentences will really get you if you don't know your grammar.
Why the circumflex over the "S" in "si?" (I don't know the Alt-code for it, so I can't type it in comments.)
Ŝ is pronounched as /sh/, while S is pronounced as /s/, so ŝi is pronounced pretty much the same as English "she"... And means the same thing.
'Si' is a different word than 'ŝi'.
For typing, I use the Windows preset of the Canadian multilingual keyboard, where it's the key right next to 'p' and then the letter to change.
Li aŭ ŝi bonas is acceptable as well because in some cases in Esperanto adjectives can double as verbs, which is rather neat imo.
The question is, are they gender fluid, or can they just not tell what gender they are?
i thought 'bono' meant 'good'. Does 'bona' mean 'good' when speaking in plural?
The word is "bona" with the adjective ending -a. The word "bono" does exist, but it's a noun meaning "goodness" or "the good". So it's really not a word you need to worry about at this moment. Stick to "bona" and you'll be OK. The plural is "bonaj". The main point is that in Esperanto nouns (names of things) end in -o, and adjectives (descriptive words) end in -a.
Instead of "estas bona", you can turn it into a verb and say "bonas". But that's rather advanced, so don't worry about it at the moment.
