[lojban-beginners] Re: lojban qua lingua franca (OT)

[Bob Slaughter <rslau@mindspring.com>]

> In a message dated 2004-03-22 5:22:51 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
> ecartis@digitalkingdom.org writes:
> 
> > Esperanto is great if you're a native speaker of Indo-European languages, 
> > but 
> > carries a lot of baggage that inhibits native speakers of languages like 
> > Swahili, Japanese, and Chinese. 
> 
> everything i've heard makes me think that esperanto is very popular in both 
> china and japan.  there doesn't seem to be much baggage inhibiting them.  

Nothing much, just things like singular vs plural, time-based tenses and first/
second/third person voice. Those are the types of places where non-IE speakers
are prone to make errors, especially in quick conversational speech. Chinese 
and Japanese *don't have* those features at all.

And just because they are *popular* doesn't mean they are *easy*. Lojban's "mi 
patfu" is grammatcially *much* more like the Chinese phrase than is
Esperanto's "Mi estas la patro."

> i found esperanto to be very easy.

And your native language is what? Esperanto is *amazingly* simple for most 
European speakers, but just as odd in many ways to non Europeans speakers as 
is English or French, only Esperanto has regular pronunciation and no 
irregular word formations.

> i find lojban to be very hard to learn, 
> especially the vocabulary.

Out of curiosity, what other languages have you learned? I found German fairly 
easy, because of its structural similarity to English, and the reasonable 
number of cognates. Japanese, on the other hand, is much harder, because of 
the 100% new-ness of the vocabulary, plus the uniqueness of the grammar 
(imagine the awkwardness of an English speaker dealing with a language that 
doesn't have *any* pronouns...)

I find Lojban simpler for me to learn than Japanese because there is less
material to learn, only about 1300 gismu, and the basics of the grammar are
straightforward. But getting the full *power* of Lojban's grammar down is
tougher, but so far seems to be very useful, as it rewards the re-thinking of 
how to express things.

And in language learning, memorizing vocabulary is the most time consuming 
activity, but in many ways the *easiest*. Re-wiring the brain's grammar nodes 
is much tougher.

>  my opinion is still that all language groups will find lojban equally
> DIFFICULT to learn.

That's also what *I* said. :)

Though I think Lojban is still simpler to learn than any natural language, and 
all in all isn't *that* difficult.

Can you tell I spent several years in grad school studying linguistics? :)


-- 
Bob Slaughter, rslau@mindspring.com     http://www.mindspring.com/~rslau/
North Georgia Modurail: http://www.mindspring.com/~rslau/ngm/
In which language of the world does the word 'taxi' mean "I cannot drive"?
e'osai ko sarji la lojban fo lonu pilno -- http://www.lojban.org/