[lojban-beginners] Re: Why not a new LfB text?

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On 10/17/07, Wood Foster-Smith <wrfostersmith@gmail.com> wrote:
> What I'm hearing andrus. saying is this (and I share the sentiment):
>
> "I'm a new lojban learner.  How can I be sure that what I'm learning in
> "lobjan for beginners" is actually correct?

You can check
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Lessons%20Errata>
for some mistakes that have been detected. Or at least things that
someone thought were mistakes, since this is a wiki and it is not
completely certain that the person making a correction necessarily
knows better. In the end you have to use your own judgement.

> Am I learning complicated rules
> of logic and grammar that people don't adhere to, or that are never used in
> practice?"

Maybe. Some of the learning material was written from a purely theoretical
point of view since it involves things that are hardly ever or never used in
practice. Again, the best policy is to exercise your own judgement, and
look at actual usage. LfB will not mislead you in such a way that the actual
usage will be incomprehensible, but it may very well dwell upon things
that you will never see in practice.

> I'm a REALLY new lojban learner -- I'm in Chapter 5 of LfB right now -- but
> I saw the earlier posting on this list about xorlo and, although I don't
> even know what gadri is yet,

gadri = article.

> I saw that xorlo touches on the use of le, lo
> and loi, and that was a pretty complex little section that I spent some good
> time trying to grasp.  It was disconcerting seeing the xorlo information and
> wondering if that was a waste of time.

If you enjoyed it, it wasn't a waste of time. If you didn't, it probably was.

> I'm not trying to be uptight about this -- it's all really just intellectual
> fun for me -- but it would be nice to know when something I'm learning isn't
> really "true", if that's ever the case.

If by "true" you mean "official", then there may be slight deviations, normally
unintentional on the part of the authors. But I wouldn't worry about them
interfering too much with your acquisition of the language. Any adjustments
you might have to make will be relatively trivial.

The beauty of language is that in the end it belongs to the speaker,
no matter what any "authority" wants to say about it. Make Lojban yours
and you get to decide what's right and what's wrong for you.

As the OP said, Lojban for Beginners is licensed under a Creative
Commons license so anyone who thinks it can be improved can do it.

mu'o mi'e xorxes