From @uga.cc.uga.edu:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Tue Nov 24 16:36:38 1992 Received: from uga.cc.uga.edu by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Tue, 24 Nov 1992 21:41:08 -0500 Received: from UGA.CC.UGA.EDU by uga.cc.uga.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 8896; Tue, 24 Nov 92 21:37:50 EST Received: from UGA.BITNET by UGA.CC.UGA.EDU (Mailer R2.08 PTF008) with BSMTP id 7820; Tue, 24 Nov 92 21:37:15 EST Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1992 21:36:38 -0500 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: More lessons learned about how to design and learn a language X-To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: Message-ID: My experiences in communicating in Russian with my children have given me added insight possibly relevant to both the Lojban community and to the conlang community at large. Russian being a language with no less than 6 cases, not all of which I know very well (even if they were totally regular), I have found that my speech error rate is extremely high in use of the cases. I have also found that this seems to make almost no difference to my children insofar as understanding goes. We aren't talking minor errors here, by the way - I am incredibly slipshod in my use of the language. So much so that a couple of people have said that I'm not speaking Russian at all, but rather some kind of pidgin Russ-american. I can't even start to understand real [adult] Russian speech at fluent rates of speed, either - my vocabulary remains much too small. My speech is perhaps 1/3 of fluent speech rates at best, even when I am reading prepared text with accents marked I don't do much better. This isn't just incidental usage, by the way. Conversation in this household has been entirely in Russian for the last month except between my wife and myself, and when people visit or telephone (and a number of Russianisms seem to slip in there, too). My slowness at picking up the language when I am in a total immersion situation many hours a day have only confirmed in my mind how much difficulty I have in learning languages. But my kids understand me, and think I speak Russian VERY WELL [even when I read then stories in Russian and have to guess the accents on words - Russian is not especially regular in stress to my mind]. And they know enough to be able to tell the difference. This isn't just happiness that I've made an effort, or a desire to please papa; they distinguish my level of speech from Nora's (she has studied roughly 2/3 of my level of vocabulary and grammar, but spent much more time listening to tapes and she HAS spoken another language conversationally: French), I have come to believe that kids just have a far different threshold of what constitutes "good" language use: if you are understood most of the time, especially when you can get clarification when you don't understand, this is fine. There is a high enough degree of redundancy in the language that my error rates do not destroy communication. As backup data, I have to note that my son, Avgust, has a bit of a speech impediment - his 'l's and 'r's are rarely distinguishable, and likewise for me his "s"s and "sh"s and may of his palatalizations. His sister seems to have no problem understanding him in spite of these problems, and I usually don't provided that the words are ones that I know (if I have to go to the dictionary, I can rarely figure out the sounds well enough from his speech to come close to the spelling). My kids also make a good number of grammatical errors, especially in case selection, that even I notice. Some verbs lose their endings, and they make frequent apparent errors in using some case structures regularly that are apparently quite common in Russian (e.g., use of dative "subject" with several verbs of attitude/intension). I make these errors too, but I'm quite sure they didn't learn it from me, because I think they were saying such things back in Moscow when I as yet could hardly make out what they were saying and relied on the translator for much of our interaction. Where I have limits in communication is in vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary. My 1000 or so words of Russian just isn't enough for the task of communication even at the 6 year old level, and my vocabulary isn't growing nearly fast enough to hope for fluency in a matter of months. I thus have gotten very fast at using the dictionary, and sometimes just paraphrase around the subject. My conclusions: The argument over the "difficulty" of the accusative endings of Esperanto for English speakers is irrelevant. This is a problem in learning Russian, too. The error, when you do make it, rarely if ever seems to cause any difficulty in understanding, and meanwhile the influence of hearing people do it correctly has (very) slowly improved my skill. It just plain doesn't matter that much in speech, and may not even in writing unless maybe you are writing poetry. (I make far fewer errors of this type in my rare writing efforts in Russian - the problem for me is largely one of trying to speak at communicative rates of speed.) I will go so far as to say that I now think that as long as the grammar rules are regular, reasonably few in number, and can be explained in terms that you can understand, that there is no conlang grammar that is too hard. Explaining in terms you understand, in my mind includes explaining at least all first-order interactions between rules: the trickiest part of Russian for me has been remembering what rules are most important, and how imposition of one rule may affect whether another comes into play. I also have had little trouble with the Russian phonology, although it makes a number of distinctions that are not made in English. Both my kids understand what I say quite well - I've never noticed any failure of communication that was directly traceable to mispronunciation of a strange phoneme. Some adult Russian speakers have even said that my accent is acceptable [although I'm sure quite noticeable]. So I suspect that if the phonology has reasonably regular rules (as regular as Russian is probably sufficient), it will not impose much of a burden on learning. But vocabulary remains the big pain. Cognates help some, but not that much, from what I've found. When most of the words do not have an English cognate, I find that the few that are cognates feel more like surprises than useful crutches. I don't trust my memory with these cognates, unless they are the kind of special vocabulary words that are likely to be borrowings from another language. I seem to do much better with words that have Lojban cognates, or even non-cognate word parts that I can map to Lojban or English after the manner of the Loglan word-making algorithm, or some other indirect or unusual memory hook to hang the word on. This of course makes me feel much better about the Lojban vocabulary's learnability, of course. I'm finding the techniques working well on another language that wasn't "designed". The main lesson all this has taught me, though, is that people trying to learn another language, whether a conlang, or a natlang, should STOP AIMING FOR PERFECTION in their self-expectations. Indeed you should not worry if you hardly know where to start in communicating. Just DO IT!!! Express yourself, and let others give you feedback on whether they understand you, and where they had problems. I suspect that with most conlangs, you'll reach a reasonable communicative written level of skill quite quickly (not a literary or formal translation skill level, but one that allows you to communicate what you essentially need and want to in real life). I think this also helps me as a reviewer of other people's writing efforts in Lojban. I need to review at two levels: first of all, did I understand what the speaker was essentially trying to say (not worrying the details - did I get the essential information?), and only then worrying about such things as grammar errors and word-choices and culturally-biased expressions, etc. The latter I can mostly save for the people who can write in Lojban almost as well as I can (or better). Using this standard, my suspicion is that Lojban has been demonstrated learnable for people of several native languages in very short order. (I think Nick Nicholas said to me a few months ago that it may take a few weeks to be able to write understandably, and maybe 3 months of serious effort to be good enough to be among the leaders of the project. He and a couple of others have actually done better than this, but given my experiences as to the minimum standard necessary for Russian communicative competence, I now think that this is true of most everybody.) 3 or 4 attempts of writing a paragraph of text, and getting useful commentary on errors that are IMPORTANT to human communicative understanding (as opposed to what is important for unambiguous computer understanding) will make anyone a Lojbanist. Funny, now that I think about it, I suspect that our conversation sessions already practice this. We make a lot more errors in practice when speaking the language in Lojban conversation sessions. But we concentrate on different types of errors than I seem to notice in writing, and ignore most others, except for pedagogical purposes. lojbab