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Message-ID: <e6663d200705290638n6372faf8x661024121791db2a@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 09:38:37 -0400
From: "Matt Arnold" <matt.mattarn@gmail.com>
To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: dicussions about basic vocabulary
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On 5/29/07, m.kornig@sondal.net <m.kornig@sondal.net> wrote:
> Selon Vid Sintef <picos.picos@gmail.com>:
>
> > But by { pendo = Freund(in) } people may not notice even the fact that such
> > thing as "a place structure" exists in Lojban, first of all. It's blotting
> > out the vital principle of Lojban.
>
> I would claim that "knowing the principles" of Lojban (or any
> other language for that matter) is not important for a beginner.
> Beginners usually don't care about such things. They just want to
> learn to speak at a very basic level. They don't need to know
> principles. In fact, I believe knowing (or learning) principles
> is not helping much. For most learners it's juch a waste of time...
>
> Vid, I know that this may sound like a mere provocation to you
> and others who appreciate grammars, structure and principles
> of languages and who are used to learning languages that way.
> But I strongly believe most (ordinary) people just don't learn
> languages that way...
>
> May I suggest, that we interrupt this discussion for now
> until my e-learning tool is up and running? Maybe you will
> understand my point then. And if my tool turns out to be
> not any good I will distroy it knowing that I've learned
> something important about how you (don't) learn languages.
>
> That's a promise. Okay?
>
> For the time being I would appreciate your comments and
> your help with this project very much. Can I count on
> you?
>
> > I, too, had been naively thinking it should be ok if I treat gismu as "noun"
> > or "verb" or "adjective" in accordance with their English translations; but
> > I regret, because that didn't realy help improve my understanding of Lojban.
> > It might also become a stumbling block to one's future progress if he
> > falsely gets used to that idea at an early stage of learning. My suggestion
> > is that every Lojban learner must be aware, from the beginning, of the fact
> > that gismu is not "noun" nor "verb" nor "adjective"; it's "gismu".
>
> In fact, I plan not to use grammar words at all. I won't try to explain
> the term "gismu" and will not use words like "noun", "adjective", "article",
> "verb", etc.
>
> Martin
>

Martin,

Your heart is in the right place. I support intuitive and naturalistic
learning materials that focus on simple, useful vocabulary samples. In
fact, many plans are already in place that you would like a lot, such
as Intensive Course In Spoken Lojban (ICSL), to which your
contribution of labor would be invaluable.

However, the intuitive naturalistic approach must be tempered by
including some instruction in place structure and other explanations
of the oddities the learner experiences, or they will be completely
lost. Feel free to work on your learning tool in any way you wish, but
if your goal is to teach how to speak basic Lojban while concealing
how Lojban is radically different from English, that method
contradicts that goal.

They won't learn to speak basic Lojban. They'll learn to speak
malglico and then have to unlearn it.

According to the word frequency list at
http://teddyb.org/~rlpowell/hobbies/lojban/flashcards/big_list , some
of the most important words in Lojban are "le" "lo" ".i" "cu" "nu"
"se" and "be". English has no words for these. Even basic Lojban
cannot be spoken without them. More to the point, all the words in
English are spoken in a different order than they are in Lojban, so if
you just exchange the vocabularies as a one-to-one cipher of "go" for
"klama", you would not be saying what you think you're saying.

Lojban is easy to learn if difficulty is measured from a blank slate.
But in the real world where we are not blank slates, the claim of
easiness is untrue. You have to forget what you know, because so much
of what you learn about language is wrong in Lojban. Most European
languages are easy to learn by Europeans and North Americans, because
they do not have to forget what they know. They carry over
unquestioned linguistic assumptions. But natural languages are so
inconsistent, that they would be harder for a blank slate to learn
than Lojban.

-Eppcott