From arntrich@stud.ntnu.no Sun Aug 12 05:54:40 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: arntrich@stud.ntnu.no X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_1); 12 Aug 2001 12:54:39 -0000 Received: (qmail 56175 invoked from network); 12 Aug 2001 12:54:38 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 12 Aug 2001 12:54:38 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO due.stud.ntnu.no) (129.241.56.71) by mta2 with SMTP; 12 Aug 2001 12:54:37 -0000 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by due.stud.ntnu.no (Postfix) with ESMTP id 42E2E17A29 for ; Sun, 12 Aug 2001 14:54:35 +0200 (CEST) Received: from jeeves.stud.ntnu.no (jeeves [129.241.56.14]) by due.stud.ntnu.no (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8ED9417A27 for ; Sun, 12 Aug 2001 14:54:34 +0200 (CEST) Received: from localhost (arntrich@localhost) by jeeves.stud.ntnu.no (8.10.0.Beta12/8.10.0.Beta12) with ESMTP id f7CCsZ616803 for ; Sun, 12 Aug 2001 14:54:35 +0200 (MEST) X-Authentication-Warning: jeeves.stud.ntnu.no: arntrich owned process doing -bs Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2001 14:54:35 +0200 (MEST) To: Subject: Re: [lojban] New to lojban, any suggestions? In-Reply-To: <9l1op2+k2ts@eGroups.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Virus-Scanned: by AMaViS perl-10 From: Arnt Richard Johansen X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 9438 > Can anyone share there stories of learning Lojban, how far they are > at, and how they enjoy it? I've written some of my story of learning Lojban at . Basically I've studied Lojban on my own, on the basis of the electronic wordlists and the draft reference grammar. It is true that one can get a grasp of the basic grammar in a matter of hours or days. But to be able to say what I wanted to say, I had to acquire some more vocabulary. This I did primarily with Logflash, the LLG's fine gismu drilling program. I can't remember exactly how much time I used to work through all of the 1342, but I think it took me about six months, while at the same time reading the messages from the mailing lists. It wasn't until about a year after I first discovered Lojban, that I felt confident enough to introduce myself (in Lojban, of course!) to the mailing list. Nowadays, Lojbanic IRC is sort of taking off, with one or two people on most of the time. I fondly remember the evening last week when we had more than five active participants online... :) As Nick Nicholas mentioned, mastering Lojban can be intensely rewarding, more so than most other languages. I sincerely feel that Lojban grammar has an entirely different "look and feel" than the other languages I know or have a rudimentary understanding of -- which includes Esperanto. > Does any one have any good suggestions for how best to study it? > I've already gone through most of the basic grammar stuff, it's more > an issue of learning vocabulary. Use Logflash (or another computer program for drilling gismu). Stay away from software that drills cmavo, the descriptions in the dictionary ("making a tanru", "sentence ordinal", "end text scope", etc.) are almost useless in teaching you what they mean and how they are used. Instead, read a lot of Lojban text (on this mailing list, on the mailing list jbosnu, and on the web), with wordlists and grammar/course nearby, if necessary. Visit us on IRC (channel #lojban on irc.openprojects.net), and talk about anything you like. Its web page is at http://www.miranda.org/~jkominek/lojban/, its statistics should give you an idea of what times are the best to stop by. We are very friendly (meaning that we will point out any and all errors that you make). > What is the state of Lojbanistan? How many people, and fluent > speakers, are people happy speaking it? To me, the biggest drawback with Lojban is the number of people who are speaking it. It is actually true that I have never had a verbal conversation in Lojban with anyone, ever. Most probably, I am the only one in Norway who knows Lojban, and there are no one that I know of in the rest of Scandinavia either. The Internet is, for the time being, the only place I can meet fellow Lojbanists. -- mu'o mi'e tsali