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Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: taking action
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From: selpahi <seladwa@gmx.de>
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Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 14:03:34 +0200
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On 02.09.2016 01:19, suzanys wrote:
>
>     I think a more formalised/explicit/organised mentoring process might
>     help bring the community closer together. It might help retain more
>     learners and form more invested friendships.
>
>
> That's a great idea! As a new learner, it'd be great to have someone to
> help introduce and integrate me into the community. Maybe another
> approach would be to pair new learners together. I'm not sure which
> would work better!

We could try both.

I suppose the latter approach would include maintaining a list of people 
currently learning (preferably along with their geographic location) so 
we don't have to go asking around for a matching study partner whenever 
a new person "finds us".

Mentoring is a great concept - in theory. Sadly I often spend a lot of 
effort introducing a newcomer to the language (teaching grammar, giving 
learning advice, supplying useful links) only to find them never return. 
It seems to me that people stick around if they want to, and it doesn't 
matter much (generally, though there are of course counter-examples) how 
much you try to help them. If they care about the language they will 
stay and keep studying, and if they never cared that much, no amount of 
mentoring, motivating, supporting, will make them stay. I do not have 
enough fingers on my hands and feet combined to count the people who 
seemed like they were serious about the language and then dropped off 
the face of the earth despite having made good progress and having 
received plenty of help and encouragement.

I don't believe this is a phenomenon that is specific to the Lojban 
community. It is, however, one that the Lojban community suffers from.

> In addition, I would absolutely love having a voice chat room available
> (like TeamSpeak or Mumble) which wasn't solely in Lojban. I wanted to
> participate in the Sunday chats, but I got the feeling that they'd
> mostly just be in Lojban with experienced speakers. Having an open voice
> chat room is a low-investment way to practice speaking Lojban for the
> new dweebs like me. It's more personal than IRC and might be good for
> building up the community. It's pretty low-investment either way.

Oh yes, definitely. selckiku did that a bunch of times, and I remember 
tsani teaching menturi via Mumble, and I taught a few people there as 
well, but it was always spontaneous.

We did try establishing a habit of being on Mumble everyday, but it kind 
of fizzled out. When nobody else joins for days or weeks it starts to 
look pointless.

There's also the very real problem that almost all of the most 
experienced speakers now live in Europe, so time zone differences start 
to matter.

Any ideas how to improve the situation?

~~~mi'e la selpa'i

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