You can essentially double your Esperanto vocabulary simply by using the prefix “mal-.” Unlike in English “mal-” does not indicate negativity; it simply means that the word containing the prefix must be treated as its opposite. It does not work for nouns, necessarily – “malviro” does not mean “woman,” for example. You would use “malvarma” to mean “cool” or “cold,” or “malfacila” for “difficult.”

You might encounter some humorous opposites when you apply “mal-” to verbs. The verb “trinki” means “to drink.” So what exactly does “maltrinki,” or “to un-drink” mean? Well…This is something you would do in the lavatory…

Building new words with Esperanto can be easy, but be careful about what you end up creating!