Esperanto as the royal road to English

Esperanto as the royal road to English

At my ipernity account, I have started an on-going test of English, with questions along the lines of TOEFL or IELTS. It consists of multiple-choice questions. The unique feature is that the test is in Esperanto. So, this is, moreover, along the lines of “springboard to languages”. Thus, those who have taken the advice to learn Esperanto before English, or at least in parallel with English, have this additional English-strengthening resource at their disposal.

It’s just one question at a time. When it seems that people have finished with that question, I will post the answer, and then give them another question, and so on. So, this is like “eĉ guto malgranda, konstante frapante, traboras la monton granitan” (which of course comes as no news to anyone who knows infinitesimal calculus).

Anywho, what I have done is to post the first such question at my ipernity account. It looks like this:

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Defio 1 pri la angla

Elektu la ĝustan respondon, metante komenton sube.

Kiam almenaŭ tri komentoj estas afiŝitaj, la ĝusta respondo estos rivelita.

La modo de “Have a nice day.” estas:

1) indikativa
2) imperativa
3) subjunktiva
4) iu alia

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I’m leading off with this question because I’m in China, teaching English, and a common mistake by Chinese learners of English is, not surprisingly, to import their grammar into English. It seems that sentences in Chinese that begin with a verb are always in the indicative mood, or at least those beginning with “have”, which Chinese use for expressing existential quantification, which we handle in English by other means. For example, to express the idea “It is raining.” my wife (who is Chinese) says “Have a rain.”. So, what this means is that Chinese learners of English are prone to misunderstand “Have a nice day.” to mean “It is a nice day.”. I’m given to understand that in Chinese, the way that they handle this is to use the verb “wish”, for example “Wish you a nice day.”.

Regards,
Mike Jones