On Mar 2, 2007, at 10:48 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 Lojbanterminology 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.I'm sympathetic to this, but I think a conlang is different from a natural lang in a practical sense. Lojban is no one's "native" language, and no one learns it as a first language in infancy. (So far...)I'm looking at having another baby in the next couple of years. So try to butter me up. :)
It would certainly be interesting, but if it'd actually work or no I'd be hard pressed to say. See, we tend to think of children and babies learning language easily when it's actually quite a bit of effort. And they're not inclined to just pick up a language unless there's a strong driving force to know it.
Your first language you learned because it was so useful. And you learned the exceptions because you got made fun of when you were little and messed them up. But it took about 5 or 6 years to get that far -- 2 or 3 to pick up the basics. And learning language took up a healthy chunk of your time.
So the point is that you'd have to make it worth while for a baby to learn Lojban. I've heard at some point of a Klingon speaker who tried to only speak Klingon to his son (I may have genders swapped up here though). The son never picked much up because Dad kept having to drop to English for words like "table", and Dad would speak English anyhow.
Anyone with grandparents who don't speak much English hits on that same thing -- as a baby you didn't learn their language because it was just too much work and you didn't need it. Maybe you learned to understand them and hit a happy medium -- I know a couple folk who can understand their parents' and grandparents' first language but can't put together in it to save their life.
It might be possible to learn a language as an adult using "pre- linguistic" techniques, but I've never heard of it being done in a pure sense.I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but people visiting foreign countries can and do pick up languages using nothing but their motor cortices and auditory midbrains. Or something. And if half of the advocacy that is (or was) at lojban.org is true, the same ought to be possible with lojban. -Carl
This follows exactly from the first -- you can sort of tap into the less conscious learning learning parts of your brain, but you have to make it worth your while. I'm speaking here as rather a polyglot -- I'm only much good for real conversation in English and Spanish, but I've studied half a dozen other languages. And the sooner you start speaking and putting together sentences, errors be damned, the sooner your brain starts to treat it as important.
So, if you want to make someone else learn Lojban as a child, you'd have to only speak it to them and probably only respond to it as well. And more likely than not, they'd have to hear you talking to other people in Lojban to pick up things like pronouns properly.
And if you want to teach yourself to speak in Lojban, start by thinking in Lojban. Don't make a thought in English and then translate it into Lojban -- skip out on the middle. Make a thought without words and translate that into Lojban, or start it in Lojban to begin with. It's hard at the beginning, but it gets better. That's how, for example, I wrote the bits for my Lojban Reader. Although I really haven't thought in Lojban since last writing on it.