[lojban-beginners] Re: mi'e rai'n

["Chris Capel" <pdf23ds@gmail.com>]

On 6/16/06, Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> Well, it's very different from other languages, so if you don't
> already have experience learning other languages you have to do both
> the regular work involved in learning your second language (which is
> hard) plus the work involved in twisting your brain around Lojban,
> which is wierd.

I'm not convinced that Lojban grammar is, in itself, really that hard
to learn relative other languages. I mean, getting down pat the
meanings of prepositions and heavily overloaded idioms and honorifics
and formality levels in other languages sounds a lot more complicated
than anything in Lojban. (What does "por" mean in Spanish? "ya"? I
doubt definitions for those would be any less complications than
definitions for {lo}/{le} or {tu'a}.)

Now, it might be that because of the state of the community, the
available learning materials, and the ways that people have to go
about learning the language, that Lojban grammer *is* especially hard
to learn. But this isn't due to the grammar itself, but only to the
state of learning materials and lack of live classes and such.

Also, many of the people on this list have been heavily involved in
actually *defining* the language, and so they know much more about the
innards than a student of the mature language will have to. This could
skew one's perspective.

Chris Capel
--
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)