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- "La manĝaĵo kaj trinkaĵo bong…
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Does anyone else have trouble distinguishing between the sound of ĝ and ĵ? EDIT: Pfiff at https://www.duolingo.com/skill/eo/Food/3 has an excellent explanation; essentially the difference in the sounds contained in the words "job" - ĝ, and "vision" - ĵ.
It is easy for me since Hungarian also has these two voices as separate letters. Ĝ is dzs and ĵ is zs. Our signs reflect that they sound similarly. The starting point is the zs ( ĵ ). When someone can pronounce it, can actually do the same with dzs ( ĝ ) as one starts pronouncing the letter d and the zs ( ĵ ) immediately after it (the same time, in the end). You can master the sound if you repeat them faster and faster until they will become one voice. (It is a very rare Hungarian letter and kids had studied it in schools this way when they haven't been watching American animations all the time.)
On this page - http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/affixes.html - they say that "aĵ" is used for "shows a concrete, tangible manifestation of the root". Which makes sense for that animals, but I cannot see reason for the "manĝaĵo" a "trinkaĵo" either.
The compound subject kind of threw me on this one since individually you would say "the food tastes good" or "the drink tastes good" plus food and drink are sometimes, but not always, collective nouns in American English. "The food and drink tastes good," sounds more natural to my ear, but I accept that it may not be grammatically correct. English is hard.
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I left a report about this. English is the only language I personally know which has singular & plural verbs. If a sentence has multiple subjects, but they can all be perceived as singular elements, then the singular verb is acceptable, In this instance, that would be "tastes."
And yes, for the non-native English speakers out there, English singular verbs often end in "s", the plural verbs do not. Exactly opposite of the nouns.
Why? I don't know. He's on third base.
To me, also a native English speaker, "The food and drink tastes good" sounds wrong. It sounds better as "The food and drinks taste good," because being a compound subject, that automatically makes the subject plural, even if each individual noun is singular. We wouldn't say "John and Mary is happy," we'd say "John and Mary ARE happy," even though John is one person and Mary is one person--togethery, they are two people.
No. It can either be "La mangxajxo kaj trinkajxo bongustI<i>as</i>" with bongustas acting as a verb or "La mangxajxo kaj trinkajxo estas bongust<i>a</i>j" with bongusta acting as an adjective, hence the need for an auxiliary verb. That's the beauty of esperanto: you can take a word, change the ending, and get a related word but of a different part of speech!
A meal is "any of the regular occasions in a day when a reasonably large amount of food is eaten." source
Putting an -o at the end will make words a noun. The suffix -aĵ is a substance or concrete idea. In this case manĝo is meal, and manĝaĵo is food. You generally have to learn what the words will translate to as it can vary, but people would probably understand what you meant even if it wasn't the usual word used.