[lojban-beginners] Re: dicussions about basic vocabulary

[m.kornig@sondal.net]

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