[lojban-beginners] Re: My First Lojban Words 1.4

["Vid Sintef" <picos.picos@gmail.com>]

You are right, Martin. Lojban is meant to be spoken as well as written. Precisely that's why the sentence separator (.i) or the quotes (lu ... li'u) have its own sounds to be pronounced.

However, we must have in mind the fact that most of the Lojban beginners' learning & practicing occur on the internet and not in a language school or in a shopping mall. The process of learning Lojban really differs from that of learning 
e.g. Spanish. There are far more online resources & opportunities for practicing Lojban with people than on a street or in a cafe. A Spanish learner may primarily want to know the word for e.g. "train" since he will have to distinguish such a frequent word in order to be "guided" in a real Spanish language society. On the other hand, a Lojban learner may want/need to know rather various internet-related words than "train" since she will have to figure them out and use them by herself 
at the very first stage of communicating with other Lojbanists in Lojban (otherwise she won't be able to even 
enter & observe the real Lojbanic sphere). And then she is free to jot down other vocabularies of preference as her own personal strategy. If she likes dogs and would like to know the word for it, she'll simply look up it on gimste. If she somehow can't find it there, she'll ask other Lojbanists through this mailing list, for example.

On 5/28/07, m.kornig@sondal.net <m.kornig@sondal.net> wrote:

And once I have learnt some more, may be in a year or
so, I expect to meet up with some of you to see
whether it really works, and whether the words
(and the grammar) I've learnt are really useful...

Maybe this explains the different views we seem
to have on "useful" words to learn for beginners?

I'd distinguish between "general usefulness" and "personal usefulness". I understand your view which sees words like "dog" to be basic. It might depend on people's perspectives, though. It's ideological to think that the basic & useful concepts of animal in this world are decisively "dog", "cat", and "mouse". Why not simply "animal" ( danlu) as a more elementary concept? Also I think you can omit "boy" and "girl" if you mind the number of items in the list, since beginners may acceptably express those concepts as "little man" ( cmalu nanmu) and "little woman" (cmalu ninmu), respectively. If you list "room" (kumfa ) you can omit "lounge" (zutku'a) and "kitchen" (jupku'a) since expressions like { barda kumfa } and { jukpa kumfa } as respective alternatives of "lounge" and "kitchen" are understandable ({ barda } and { jukpa } ars already on your list, right?).

Actually I was planning myself to make something like yours in Polish, Turkish, Swahili, Chinese, and Japanese. But I haven't started anything for it. Simply because I know I haven't yet got clear perspective of Lojban to rightly tell of its essences.

Vid