[lojban-beginners] Re: lojban-beginners Digest V6 #30

[Alex Martini <alexjm@umich.edu>]

On Mar 2, 2007, at 1:58 PM, Carl Lumma wrote:

> > What I was trying to say (and apparently didn't express well)
> > was that, in an audio CD course, it would be easier to learn the  
> > Lojban
> > terminology a little at a time after teaching some phrases and
> > vocabulary.
>
> What I was trying to say is that I'd rather not learn the
> grammar at all -- I'd just like to learn to speak it.  That's
> the real test of a language anyway.  All of you who are interested
> in testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can't hope to get any data
> before people are speaking it fluently.
>
> -Carl

I'm going to assume you mean you don't want to learn any
named grammar. As in, you don't care what the stuff is called,
you just want to learn how to use it. If you don't have any grammar
at all in a course, all you'd learn from it would be a bunch of words
in isolation and rote phrases. That would be helpful for the  
intermediate
students who already know most of how to make sentences in Lojban
and want to expand their vocabulary, but not ideal for the beginner.

If we made something like the Pimsleur style CD, we probably
wouldn't have any reason to name the grammar stuff anyhow. None
of the CDs from Pimsleur that I've listened to do either. And that's how
you learned your first language, so I find it more natural than  
purposely
memorizing a set of rules.