[lojban-beginners] Re: Constructive comments requested.

[ANDREW PIEKARSKI <totus@rogers.com>]

Given that I am not a "child" who grew up speaking lojban, but rather a "child" learning to speak lojban, wouldn't The Berenstien Bears or The Little Prince be a better first reader after all?

mu'o mi'e .andrus.

----- Original Message ----
From: Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>
To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2007 7:47:19 PM
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Constructive comments requested.


On Friday 20 April 2007 17:57, Alex Martini wrote:
> Well, from my point of view, the Lojban translation is just too darn
> hard to read. I can't get through the first paragraph without
> consulting jbovlaste a dozen times, and then dipping back into CLL
> because I don't understand the cmavo that the translator's using.
>
> A children's book (or a beginner's book) needs to have just enough
> challenge to send me hunting for the dictionary every so often, but
> the majority of the vocab should be already within reach. This was my
> frustration that motivated me to start writing the Lojban Reader
> ( http://umich.edu/~alexjm/reader0.html ) although I haven't had the
> time/motivation to work on it recently.
>
> In my view, Alice in Wonderland in it's Lojban version, is really
> more like adult books -- once you understand how to read the language
> well enough do it without thinking much there's a lot of great story
> to be told. But if you're reading it in jbofi'e line-by-line
> translation anyhow, you're not really getting much.

Alice isn't a book for children just learning to read. It's for a child who's 
had a few years of schooling and knows words like "antipodes/studukti" and 
would recognize "antipathies/smudukti" (the Lojban means "antonym") as an 
error for it.

Alice, in Lojban, is a book for children who grew up speaking Lojban. If I had 
Alice in a language I don't know (such as Hungarian) and a dictionary of that 
language, it would be pretty hard for me to figure it out. What works for me 
(I did it a lot with French when I was a kid) is to read the English and 
Lojban versions together, without using a dictionary. So reading the first 
sentence you may figure out that {re'o} means "by", or you may be confused by 
the word order and just go on to the next sentence. If you're reading the 
texinfo code, you can see the English text and our notes in comments between 
the Lojban paragraphs.

Pierre