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If you know a little French, think of "nous" and "vous". (My favorite spelling mistake is to write "me" instead of "mi".
ikr it's been like 5 times I got something wrong because I thought "ni" was "you"
In Mandarin, "你（ni）“ means "you (informal)" as well. I can't type actual pinyin diacritic thingies here, but entering "ni" on a pinyin keyboard will return "你"... along with "泥" which means "mud." I don't confuse "ni" with mud, but I do think "you..." Eh...
Sounds like a very silly sentence to me. I interpreted it as 'We are going to dance', but that was marked incorrect.
Ni iras - We dance. Ni iras -We are dancing.
"We are going to dance" would be some kind of future tense.
"Go" and "dance" are two seperate actions here. Although this is not tht the correct translation, think of it and like this: Ni iras kaj dancas - We go and then we dance.
Hope that helps. :)
It is a "silly" sentence indeed, which makes as much/little sense in Esperanto as in English. "Ni iras danci" = We are going [somewhere] to dance, or "Ni dancos" = We will dance / We are going to dance, or "Ni marŝas kaj dancas" = We walk and dance would make more sense. But these words / forms have not been taught yet. :)
Forget about English that you know already and read the sentence again "we are going to dance". Did you get it? We are what? We are going. Huh? Going to where? Going to... dance? Huh? Now, English is silly.
Why not "we go to dance"? Is this a proper Esperantan hendiadys or is it just taken straight from English? Or does it mean that we go and we also, quite separately from going, dance (and not "we go to dance")?
It is always pronounced as t͡s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_affricate#Voiceless_alveolar_sibilant_affricate
Do you know if the "ts" pronunciation is similar to the Japanese "tsu" without the "u" sound? That technical wikipedia entry doesn't help me that much XD
According to my beginner knowledge of Japanese, something like that. You can listen to some phrases and make your own opinion :) For me, as a russian native speaker, so the sound t͡s is quite natural ;)
I wouldn't be sure how to produnce /t͡s/as opposed to /ts/ but surely, if you just said it as /dantsas/ as opposed to /dant͡sas/ (for the time being) you'd be understood?
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Is there any difference between "simple present tense" and "present continuous tense" in Esperanto?
There is an explicit present continuous tense (e.g. "mi estas dancata"), but it only used if really necessary (i.e., rarely). Wherever possible Esperanto uses the simple past, present, and future tenses (-is, -as, -os). So usually dancas is used for both "I dance" and "I am dancing".
I've been meaning to get around to this, but what is the equivelant of "Ya'll" or "Vosotros" in Esperanto?
I've heard that there used to be "ci", though there's little documentation on its usage.
Google translate only gives me "Vi ĉiuj", which means "You all".
However, I feel that this is clumsy. As a Texan, I am used to having the contracted word "Y'all". I am also used to the proper Spanish word "Vosotros" which works better than Central/Southern American "Ustedes"
I think having a proper word for 2nd person plural is important. Some linguists say it's unnecessary because "You all" could be used. Though, couldn't the same be said for "Me all"?
(I'm assuming that there was a definite choice to avoid having both sing. and plur. forms of the 2nd person pronoun (you), so as to avoid the development that a number of European languages have, where the plural "you" gets used as a polite, formal "you" for singular, too.)
"Ci" is usually only used in translations where the original had words like "vosotros" in contrast with the singular. Vi is normally used otherwise. (as much as I got from that Wikipedia article... By the way, there is an Esperanto Wikipedia)
