NJ_Esperantist's blog
My daughter came up with this last week while we were otherwise occupied. The game is very simple, but I think it's a good one to help learn sentence forming and occasionally a new word. One person gives the first, or other player two nouns and a verb in Esperanto. That person must then form a sentence containing those words. Sounds like a good game in the car, too.
A while ago, I mentioned a game which I play with my daughter in Esperanto. I finally feel that I got the bugs worked out and I’m ready to show the world. Below you will find the rules and guidelines for this game. You might also want to check it out on my other blog as it has pictures.
http://koplushian.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/frazludo-a-make-it-yourself-e...
My Tomtom GPS Speaks Esperanto!
Well, it was a bit of a struggle, but I finally got my sound files recorded, converted, and compiled and put on my Tomtom GPS. The first struggle was translating the 59 voice clips of the words and phrases used by the device. It puts them together in meaningful ways to tell the user where to turn right or left, turn around, make a U-Turn and when you’ve reached your destination. Seems I created some discussion over on Lernu over what to call a turn and how one refers to a U-Turn in Esperanto.
Then I recorded the commands using Audacity. With that I saved the files as .OGG.
Then I had to download viftool, which is a little program used to compile all of my sound files into one data file compatible with the Tomtom. This gave me some trouble as first I unzipped viftool file by file. I was supposed to simply unzip the folder it was in.
My brother in law gave me his 2 year old Tomton GPS. (I think he got a new one for his birthday.) So like I always do, I was playing around with it and exploring things related to it when I discovered that the voices are customizable. That is I can record myself in Esperanto and with some dabbling make my Tomtom speak Esperanto. Plus, I can share the voice file with the rest of the worldwide Tomtom community.
This is important because I just know there's a burning need for this!! I wonder if anyone has done this in Klingon yet.
There are about 50 commands which I have to translate into Esperanto for reading. More fun on the horizon for me.
Ken Caviness has begun a project on Audioboo to read the Bible aloud and compile the recorded files together into an audio Bible in Esperanto. This is something even the Klingons don't have.
Ken has made a start of it, having already read the book of Galatians and has just started the Gospel according to St. John. I've decided to join forces with him and just today added the first chapter of Ecclesiastes.
If anyone else would like to help us out, please check out the instructions on this page:
http://audioboo.fm/boos/247526-intro-what-am-i-doing-here
One of the fun things I’ve done is to translate the back covers of books into Esperanto. What follows is my Esperanto translation of the rear cover of Anne McAffrey’s book, The Dolphins of Pern. While I have no intention of ever translating the entire book, I did go through and find many of the phrases used by the dolphins (who initially speak a corrupted (to us) form of English. I’ve compiled a few of these, plus my Esperanto Translation on the bottom of this page:
http://vortoj.wiki-site.com/index.php/Dragonriders_of_Pern
Enjoy
La Delfenoj de Pern
Alemi vidis la maston splitiĝi kaj rompiĝi, kaj palpis la pli streĉitan mantenon de Readis. Tiam, subite ili estis starigitaj post ondoj frapis la tribordan flankon kaj verŝis ilin en la agitan maron. Li plifortigis sian tenon al Readis. Super la muĝego de la ŝtormo li aŭdis la timoplenan krion de la knabo.
Things are still going well. We've done lesson 5 from the postal course. I've also supplemented a few dialogues from Jen Nia Mondo. My daughter has taken to translating, mostly on her own with my good Welles dictionary, a few songs from Veggie Tales. The mistakes she is making are your basic beginner ones like the adjective/noun agreement and the occasional accusative. The course hasn't gone over participles yet, so I just put those in for her as needed.
When she askes for a word, I tell her what it should be, and spell it out to her using the Esperanto names of the letters. The only time this gives her much problem is when I'm saying the Esperanto 'i' and she's writing the English 'e'.
To help keep her interest I've taken to translating the back cover text from any of the fiction books she's reading. It was fun doing the one from 'The Guardians of Ga'Hoole'
I've mentioned a few times that my daughter and I play a game which I created to help her get comfortable with Esperanto grammar, learn vocabulary, and reinforce counting (up to 12).
The board is a track of 60 squares in a 5 pointed star pattern. Each point has a circle instead of a square. The cards are the vocab words introduced in the lessons (I'm using the text from the free ten lesson postal course) plus about 8 each of 'la' kaj' '-n' '-jn' and 'estas'. The verb tenses are all in the present tense.
Each player puts their marker on any circle on the board (the star points) and gets 5 cards to start. The object is to create 3 grammatically correct sentences of 5 or more words each. They don't have to make sense at this point, but they do have to be correct. (Can you say 'Humour and incongruity add to the interest"?)
Things are going well thus far. About the biggest stumbling block she's encountered has been getting used to pronouncing the 'aj' diphthong when an adjective become plural. I on the other hand am not helping by calling the 'j's 'y's' (because that's how they function in my head.) Oops.
The game we play is indeed helping her learn both vocabulary and grammar, although, it I, her tutor weren't there, it wouldn't work. It's more of a fun way to get used to the grammar without having to think what words you want. They're just given to you.
My daughter remains excited to learn the language, although she did tell her mom that I was teaching her Esperanto and that she (her mom) wouldn't teacher her German. Hopefully, I'm not getting myself into a bad situation. ;-)
Over the Christmas break from school, my 11 year old daughter announced to me that she would like me to help her learn Esperanto. This caught me off guard as I had all but figured I was a lone Esperantist in the house. My wife learned it when we were first dating, but has since switched to German, since relatives of her's were recently discovered in the Old Country. My daughter gets some instruction in Spanish at school, but I've rarely heard her say a word either in Spanish or German.
She has watched some of the Esperanto Muzzy videos and has enjoyed them, but nothing has really caught.
So I soft pedaled for a few days, but started making a few preparations to teach her. Just before school went back into session, I asked her if she still thought she wanted to learn it and she said yes!
