Message-Id: <199509290618.CAA20737@locke.ccil.org>
Date:         Fri, 29 Sep 1995 01:34:59 -0400
Reply-To: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Subject:      Re: Criticisms and Parts of Speech
To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
Status: OR

I will read this off-line, but some words of explanation:

The textbook is NOT the place to start learning the language.  It is an
extremely drafty document, and indeed has been written in 3 different styles
which are not necessarily compatible.

Much of what you say ios not well covered there IS covered quickly and simply
in the "Diagrammed Summary of Lojban Grammar with Examples", which is
file lojex.txt.

Now some history.
I first started writing a Lojban reference book back in 1988.  This was
mostly explication of the design, and to some extent included explanations
of design decisions.  My first round of reviewers said it was useless as
a teaching document.

In January 1989, i started writing a textbook, at the same time that I started
teaching the first Lojban class.  I  designed 18 chapters, and wrote 6 of them
starting on the 7th.  Each chapter/lesson had 3 or so sublessons and a
set of exercises/examples and vocabulary and a reading.  the intent was that
a sublesson should be coverable in one class meeting.  I wrote one
cvhapter a month, at the rate I was teaching the class.  In July, I paused
for 3 reasons, and never resumed.

a) the class paused for LogFest in July, and never resumed afterwards.
We lost continuity in our set of students.

b) A significant question came up in the class that I was unable to answer.
We went back to the drawing boards, and the result several months later
became the Negation paper that is now part of Cowan's reference grammar.
At the same time a major revision in the tense structures to the current form
was adopted at LogFest, and I spent a lot of time rewriting Lesson 4.
In short, I went out of textbook mode and into language engineering mode
for another 6 months.

c)  At the same time I was doing this, a group of Lojban students in
Blacksburg VA was attempoting to use the draft text tpo teach themselves
the language, though without a knowedgeable teacher like me leading the
class; John Hodges, who organized the class, was only slightly ahead of the
other students in understanding of the language.  In short, the textbook
failed for them - they took too long to get to the point where they could
do anything useful with the language, and as you have noted, took an
exceedingly long time to get to where they could write a simple sentence.
Meanwhile, their efforts were more towards things like writing poetry and
translating colloquial English into Lojban, and these simply are NOt
beginning student tasks.

The latter problem bugged me for a long while, and I had writer's block as
I tried to resolve the issues of writing about a design that had suddenly
turned unstable, and meet the needs of distance learners.

Meanwhile 1st class student Athelstan started teaching a Lojban minilesson
at science fiction conventions.  His style was quite different from the
one in the draft textbook, and worked rather well as an intro to the
language.  That minilesson was written up, and is on our site, though it
has the problem of having been designed for a verbal presentation, and for
an American English native audience - and on line it seems to attract a lot
of non-English natives who have trouble with some explanations and take
an exceptionally long time (3-4 hours) to complete what was supposed to be a
1-hour minlesson.

Athelstan designed and taught a second minilesson a few times but it was
never written up.  Then Athelstan was severely brain-injured in an auto
accident and has never fully recovered.  Thus we have no answer key for the
minilesson exercises (and no one to check submissions).

The intent was to develop these minilessons into something like the
Esperanto Postal Course.  This obviously hasn't happened.

Anyone who reads the minilesson and the draft textbook will undoubtedly
see that our styles were drastically different.  i couldn't pick up
Athelstan's work, and I was thoroughly convinced that the original effort
was a dead end and needed a total rewrite.

In July 1992 I started that rewrite.  That became what is now Lesson 0 and
te incomplete lesson 1  (make that July 1991, sorry).  You will note in
reading those lessons that the styles is quite different from the other
lessons: more verbose and yet simpler in the explanations - more oriented
to an overview of the language as a whole, and an exercise set for every few
pages to divide the whole into a smaller set of chunks and give people more
sense of accomplishment.  But lesson 1 was never completed.  So the fact that
it doesn't give that full overview of the language simply is a simple fact.
IT DOES however very clearly deal with the distinction between a predicate,
a predication, and sumti, and how these differ from nouns and verbs etc. (at
least >I< think it is clear.)

But I bogged down again a few months later, as is obvious - I think that was
when I started getting active on-line and still have not yet learned to
manage my net-time effectively and still get things done.  Meanwwhile I did
revise an earlier outline of the grammar into the Diagrammed Summary, and
the latter has been used by many, especially those with some linguistics
knowledge and language learning ability to self-teach the language.

Athelstan got hurt in Feb 1992, and i was active in supporting his recovery -
he was in the hospital for 5 months and it is thought that he survived and
recovered to the extent he did at least partially because of our network of
supporting friends stimulating him during a long time when he was only
semi-aware.

Meanwhile i started working to adopt my two Russian kids, which took place in
october 1992.  Istarted self-teaching Russian.  i am NOT a skilled language
learner, and this took MANY hours per week.  My Lojban work essentially
stopped except for supporting others like Cowan who were hammering out
design details.

Russian textbooks for langauge are FAR different from American textbooks.
What is more, they are VERY effective for self-teaching.  I have intended
ever since to do the next iteration of the textbook more like the Russian
model, farmning out some tasks because some aspects of such textbook writing
are NOT going to be easy for me - the Russian model uses far more exercises
and examples, and far less explaantion.

Meanwhile Cowan started writing his reference grammar, and in doing so, has
removed the need for a lot of detailed explanation in the textbook - we
now have a different document to point to, and that document is, like the
diagrammed summary, far more effective than the textbook draft at teaching
its material, even though there are no exercises or longer wirtings or
 vocabulary/pronunciation work.

But people still wanted the textbook, which was slowly drfiting out-of-date
as well as not getting finsished.  In 1993-4 Cowan took my 6 draft lessons,
broke them into the current 20-odd lessons, prepended the 1 1/2 new lessons
on the front.  he deleted anything that was obsolete, changed known errors,
but wrote little or no new material.  He assembled the remaining chunks in
a logical order, but did not have or use an semblance of an outline of a
complete textbook or a pedagogical plan.  the result is a very rough, though
less incorrect, draft that really leads nowhere.  This is not Cowan's
fault - he started with a text that didn't go anywhere.  And his writing
and organization style is enough different from my original that the three
separate efforts at writing the thing are still quite distinguishable.

Meanwhile as a parent, my Lojban time has dropped still further.  I've gotten
just enough more efficient on the net to not quite keep up with anything OR
get any tasks done.  This has caused frustration and depression both for
me and Cowan.  Things really stalled out.  I got a big positive jolt
last fall by dropping the textbook as the primary document and switiching
to the dictionary, and we now have a big chunk of draft dictionary, but things
stalled out on the cmavo portion of the dictionary, and we lost Nick Nicholas
to his thesis work right when we needed one more active detail-worker to help
on the load.  meanwhile the rest of LLG has been caught up in the very-technical
logic/quantifiers/articles discussion that has dominated for the last year
until the last couple of weeks, with little resolution and tying up every
good workers time with simply trying to follow and extremely dense discussion.


WE've come up with plans at Logfest to share the workload more, and decrease
my respsonsibilities further, but the texbook is now probably the 3rd or even
the 4th of our books that will be completed after dictionary, reference grammar
and some type of introductory book on the language that will replace the
Level 0 package.

I am glad that you and others are attempting to write intro material on the
language.  We need more, and in a variety of styles.  We can use them when we
finally get back to textbook writing, and people can use them to learn from
in the meantime.  meanwhwile, i am far enough removed from being a beginner in
the language and am not teaching a course now, so I cannot effectively argue
the pros and cons of what stuff should be up front or stressed to beginners
in a textbook - indeed I am convinced that there is no single answer.

lojbab