My two cents to all of this:
I'm newish but relatively comfortable. I came into the community after going through LFB (I can't guarantee I was done when I first came, but I was close). I worked some of the exercises in the chapters (maybe up to chapter 7 or so) but eventually I found myself trying to hack sentences together in a nonlinear fashion, and so I used it as a reference basically, until I felt comfortable enough and had sufficiently technical questions that I thought I should join the IRC and mailing lists.
So I learned {cu} first, terminators second. I didn't actually like this in the end (obviously at the time I didn't know any better). I think putting off terminators made them seem kinda intimidating. I got them, but they were one of the things that gave me more hesitation. On the other hand, I think that filling in every elidable terminator, and even more so using terminators AND {cu}, in sample sentences directed at beginners, is a horrible idea, much worse than starting with {cu}*. The sentences get horribly complicated, and a lot of the elidable terminators are very very rarely actually useful. I know a circumstance when {vau} is useful having to do with a certain construction involving GIhA but it's a pretty hard circumstance to run into, for example. And in this example, to me, that means that it is silly to teach {vau} to a newbie. If there were even remotely common circumstances when you needed it, it would be great to teach it, but with {vau} you have to go to quite a bit of effort to construct a relevant example, let alone incorporate a relevant example into a discussion of an actual topic.
So start with {ku}. When you get to abstractors, teach {kei}. When you get to {be}, teach {be'o}. When you get to {poi}/{noi}, teach {ku'o}. Around the time when you start needing two terminators (probably around the time that you get to abstractors), mention that there's a faster way that is usually used, and maybe teach it at that time. Or maybe wait until you run into three terminators (maybe around the time you hit {be} and then attempt to synthesize knowledge by putting sumti with internal sumti inside abstractors). But in short, don't teach {cu} first, imo. It can do too many things to be taught that early on, and so a person that starts with it will learn the ways that it fails in a much more hackish way, I think; by contrast, {ku}, {kei}, etc. all do pretty much one thing, and so if they are the foundation and {cu} is the icing, there won't tend to be confusion so much as inefficiency. (And people have already shown examples of {cu} causing inefficiency).
This all assumes the "learning Lojban to learn it, not to use it ASAP" hypothesis stated above, of course, which I think is probably pretty good here. This is also all based on conjecture, not data.
*I think that sentence is ungrammatical but I don't know how to fix it, sorry.
mu'oi mi'e latros.On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 8:24 PM, Minimiscience <minimiscience@gmail.com> wrote:
de'i li 06 pi'e 07 pi'e 2010 la'o fy. Lindar .fy. cusku zoi skamyxatra.
> ... and then you start seeing confused newbies that don't actually know how
> to terminate that say things like {mi cu dunda zo'e zo'e} (I have actually.skamyxatra
> seen stuff like this).
"{mi cu dunda}" is actually perfectly grammatically correct. (It's
unnecessarily verbose and arguably bad style, but if that's your sole objection
to it, you might want to look in the mirror.) "{cu}" means "the {bridi}'s main
{selbri} starts here," which implies the termination of anything before it,
rather than termination being the primary concept and the main {selbri} aspect
secondary. The only (non-obvious) grammatical restriction on "{cu}" is that it
must be preceded by at least one term in the sentence, where a "term" can be a
{sumti} (including descriptor {sumti} and pro-{sumti}), a termset, a {sumti}
tagged with a {sumti tcita}, a bare BAI KU, a NA KU, or even a FA KU.
mu'omi'e .kamymecraijun.
--
lo paroi cumki cu rere'u cumki
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