[lojban-beginners] Re: Don't memorize what you don't understand

[John Johnson <johnatl@mac.com>]

Thanks Matt. Excellent advice. All these sumtis and bridis make lojban 
even more difficult to learn.
So far 
http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/book1.html 
has been the most helpful to me. Although the Gunning Fog Index says it 
is quite high level reading, take this paragraph for instance:

You don't have to be very precise about Lojban pronunciation, because 
the phonemes are distributed so that it is hard to mistake one sound 
for another.  This means that rather than one 'correct' pronunciation, 
there is a range of acceptable pronunciation — the general principle is 
that anything is OK so long as it doesn't sound too much like something 
else.  For example, Lojban r can be pronounced like the r in English, 
Scottish or French.

I count 13 "hard" words, and 75 words total. The average number of 
words per sentence is 25. This gives a Fog Index (approximate U.S. 
reading grade level) of:

13 / 75 = 17%
(26 + 34 + 15) / 3 = 25
(17 + 25) * 0.4 = 16.8

16.8, which is not accessible to a lot of people. Still, as I said, the 
best document I've come across so far.

Thanks again!

Regards,
  JJ



On Wednesday, September 8, 2004, at 01:16 PM, Matt Arnold wrote:

> I've been using SuperMemo for PalmOS regularly for a couple of weeks, 
> and there is some advice from the SuperMemo pages that is applicable 
> to learning Lojban. Don't learn what you don't understand. I've been 
> learning vocabulary in order of how often they're used in language, 
> but many of the definitions mean nothing to me. For instance, I've 
> discarded "noi: incidental clause" for the time being, because I just 
> don't know what that is. Also "je: tanru and" because I don't even 
> know what a tanru is yet. Or the entire family of abstracts. The 
> SuperMemo website says if you create links in your brain between some 
> noises and definitions that mean nothing to you, you are only doing 
> more harm than good to your SuperMemo process. It's important to crack 
> open a copy of The Complete Lojban Language (or the internet 
> equivalents) every day, and look up the explanation and usage of the 
> linguist/logician jargon on the flashcards being committed that day. 
> Then when you feel you can use a wor!
> d in a sentence while drilling on it-- close the book, commit the 
> flashcard and go on your way. If you're not ready to use it in a 
> sentence, don't learn it or you're creating what's called "memory 
> interference."
>
> You should understand the pronunciation rules, and understand the 
> differences between a gismu and a noun, verb, adjective or adverb, 
> before you even start SuperMemo. Otherwise you are actively harming 
> your ability to speak lojban, by mis-learning it and having to 
> un-learn later with great difficulty.
>
> Case in point: after I encountered so many definitions referring to 
> "bridi" and "sumti," I finally had the idea to look up the flashcards 
> with the definitions of those words and commit them first. I had to 
> create one for "selbri." Do this when you find yourself ready in the 
> Complete Lojban Language (or its web equivalent) to advance to certain 
> classes of words whose definitions contain an unfamiliar lojban word, 
> such as "brivla" "gismu" "rafsi" "lujvo" "fu'ivla" "tanru" "cmavo" 
> "prosumti" "probridi" "discursive" "abstractor" or other jargon. If 
> there are no cards for them, make them. Next, learn a gismu and some 
> prosumti so you can make a simple utterance to use words in as you 
> memorize. Learn a new gismu every day. Maybe a new pro-sumti or a 
> simple vocative. As you learn grammar facts, make new grammar 
> flashcards to remind you of them.
> -Matt
>
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