On Jun 21, 2006, at 6:50 PM, Chris Capel wrote:
On 6/21/06, Alex Martini <alexjm@umich.edu> wrote:However, if you want to learn Lojban quickly, daily flash card sessions are the way to go.See, I'm not sure this is true. If you practice daily by reading Lojban text, or doing other sorts of exercises, and make sure that you're exposed to a good round selection of vocabulary, it's my intuition that you will pick up vocabulary more quickly than if you do flashcards or logflash or Supermemo. And I actually used Supermemo with Lojban for about a month. My progress just felt slow, compared to what might be possible with other techniques. Now, maybe flashcards are fine once you already know all the basics, to help you finish out learning all of the cmavo and gismu. Or maybe flashcards really are pretty efficient, just really boring. But they didn't feel efficient. [ li'o ]
I'm really not sure how efficient they are over the long term. I know they are very efficient for 'cramming', however. On several occasions, I have used a flash card program to learn a list of vocabulary words for a class for school around 20 or thirty words in an hour or so for a day or two. Most of what I memorized was quickly lost though, without practice. I would expect that with practice I would retain it better.
I agree though, that reading Lojban text is better. And, yes flash cards are about as boring as watching walls. Many of the words I know have an original context from which I remember them. {ba} for example, I learned from The Porous Prophet. When I confuse myself between {pu} and {ba}, I recall the phrase {le ba panje xusra} to get them straight again. Songs and stories are infinitely more interesting.
If you feel so inclined, I would ask/invite you yourself to write with the Lojban you know -- there is an unfortunate shortage of text that is truly beginner's level. The challenge is to write with vocabulary and grammar you actually know instead of looking it up in the dictionary. Which is actually why I haven't written Lesson 5 on the Reader for quite a while; I haven't been up for that kind of mental challenge.
mu'o mi'e .aleks