Read the following, out loud. Make sure you understand the first sentence; if not, go back to the previous lessons and figure out what you don't remember. The second sentence ... well, do the best you can with it.
La ideo, al kies efektivigo mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon, aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco kaj neniam min forlasadis.
Mi naskiĝis en Bjelostoko.
You should immediately recognize the meaning of the new sentence as: I did [something] in [something].
There are two new sounds/letters in this lesson. The obvious one is b, which sounds very much like the usual English b. This is an explosive sound, in which you close your lips, let air pile up behind them, and then let it out in a single fast pop. It's not like the b we sometimes hear in Spanish, which ― to the American ear ― often sounds like our v.
Notice that in Bjelostoko, the Bje is a single syllable, not two. Pronounce it like byeh.
The other new letter, ĝ, is the soft g of gem. This is often written j in English (just, jewel).
The entire sentence can be pronounced (in our fake transliteration):
mee nahs-KEE-jees ehn byeh-loh-STOH-koh
Read it aloud again (at least once), just to make sure that you can:
Mi naskiĝis en Bjelostoko.
Two new word roots in this lesson. One of them, we can pass over very quickly. Bjelostok' is simply the name of a city in what is now northeastern Poland, but was, in Zamenhof's time, western Russia (national boundaries have had a tendency to migrate over the centuries in that part of the world). In English we generally refer to it as Bialystok.
The other is nask', which describes the action of giving birth. Don't confuse this action with the one of being born, which we'll see in a few moments.
Read our new sentence again:
Mi naskiĝis en Bjelostoko.
You can see now that the meaning is: I did [something, having to do with giving birth] in Bialystok.
The missing part is the -iĝ- in naskiĝis, which takes the root nask' and changes its meaning to a related one. What might that related meaning be?
There's a clue in the form. In our last lesson we learned about -ig-, which means, basically, cause to happen. -iĝ- is closely related and equally important (remember what I said about -ig- being one of the most important suffixes in Esperanto?); basically, it means become; or, less succinctly, that whatever action this suffix is attached to, happened to the subject of the verb.
Let's take an example. Zamenhof said, in the first sentence: mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon... We see here that mi did something (dedicated), and that mian tutan vivon had something done to it (dedicated). In Esperanto, we can turn the mian tutan vivon into the subject (dropping the -N along the way) and say: Mia tuta vivo dediĉiĝis, My whole life became dedicated.
NOTE: a purist will point out that the meanings are not quite the same. Somebody like me will then point out that they are similar enough "for government work," as we liked to say when I was in the Air Force.
So: what do you think, remembering that naskis means gave birth, is the meaning of mi naskiĝis?
Read the sentence aloud again and make sure you understand it:
Mi naskiĝis en Bjelostoko.
That was quick, wasn't it. The next sentence (lesson 7) will be somewhat longer, though probably not as long as a couple of earlier lessons.