[lojban-beginners] New beginner

[Tristan Mc Leay <kesuari@yahoo.com.au>]

mi'e tcristyn. (Though I note in the archives that Nora says "mi'e 
noras" with no fullstop at the end---perhaps I haven't learnt enough.)

While Slashdot <http://slashdot.org/> was down the other day, I randomly 
followed a tangent from Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/> and bumped 
into Lojban, which I'd heard about most from the conlang mailing list 
<conlang@listserv.brown.edu> but not really paid much attention to. This 
time I did pay it some attention and found it more interesting than I 
thought.

So I've kinda read a bit about Lojban now, and decided that it sounds 
interesting and worth learning. So far, I have read various webpages, 
the first part of the level 0 booklet, and I'm working through Chapter 6 
(Time and Space) of Robin Turner and Nick Nicholas's Lojban For 
Beginners lessons. At this stage, the most annoying thing to me was that 
everything I'd read started using words (_cmene_ etc.) repeatedly before 
introducing the pronunciation, so I had to take a stab at the 
pronunciation of <c> and I was wrong, but it stuck .ue.i'enai. I've just 
about got over that. The next difficulty is because I learnt Japanese, I 
think of the order of the vowels with Italian qualities as 'a i u e o', 
so all your mnemonics screw me up! :) (.u'i.oinai) (Using nai as the 
attitudinal negator, though, was useful after Japanese.) Also, I forsee 
great difficulty with vocabulary, as it's usually the biggest and 
hardest part of any language. So could anyone help with a program that 
could randomly pop up some vocab (from a limited but increasing set) at 
random intervals on my Linux desktop?

Who am I? I'm a conlanger (of languages for fun and art, not 
international communication or scientific research). I'm also an 
Australian with English as my native language, and I've learnt bits of 
Italian (and primary school) and German and Japanese (at high school), 
but not enough to communicate (I can only remember one to ten in 
Italian, but I doubt I ever learnt much more than that!). I'm a second 
year student at La Trobe University <http://www.latrobe.edu.au/> in 
Melbourne, doing a Bachelor of Computer Science/Bachelor of Cognitive 
Science double degree. So I suppose I come to Lojban with some knowledge 
of logic and computers and psychology and linguistics (which is kinda 
the definition of Cognitive Science if anyone here didn't know; I always 
found it quite convenient that someone invented a field that combines 
many of my interests).

I'm not sure how active this board is so maybe I should cross-post to 
<lojban@yahoogroups.com>?

That is what I came to say for now.

--
| Tristan.               |       To be nobody-but-yourself in a world
| kesuari@yahoo!.com.au  |  which is doing its best to, night and day,
|                        |                 to make you everybody else---
|                        |          means to fight the hardest battle
|                        |            which any human being can fight;
|                        |                    and never stop fighting.
|                        |      --- E. E. Cummings, "A Miscellany"
|                        |
|                        |     In the fight between you and the world,
|                        |                             back the world.
|                        |      --- Franz Kafka,
|                        |         "RS's 1974 Expectation of Days"