Project: Intensive Course of Spoken Lojban

[Yanis Batura <ybatura@mail.ru>]

Intensive Course of Spoken Lojban
a project


Major goal
----------
Large number of fluent Lojban speakers


Current goal
------------
Creation of an intensive course of spoken Lojban


Background
----------
The next year will be the 10th anniversary of the fundamental Lojban
publication, "The Complete Lojban Language". At present, still, there
are no speakers in the world capable of fluent communicating in the language
at advanced level in real time - without wordlists and saying {.y.}
every thrice in a while.

Why is it so? Why can't people get to this level as it is with other
languages (natural and constructed, like Esperanto)?

It is obvious that something is missing in our Lojban universe that
could help solving this problem. Yes - problem (not having fluent
speakers *is* a problem for a famous language with a long history and
an incredible amount of efforts by many supporters).

Let's take a look at what we have now.
There is a number of materials well known for anyone who dealt
more or less seriously with Lojban. They include:

1) What is Lojban?
  An excellent introduction of major features of Lojban and
  ideas laying in its design.

2) Lojban For Beginners (LFB)
  A basic training course aimed at getting people accustomed to the features
  of Lojban.

3) The Complete Lojban Language (CLL)
  A book answering almost all questions about the language

4) Gismu, cmavo, lujvo lists and jbovlaste


While this is, of course, sufficient for slow-paced, solid *written*
translation to and from Lojban, it's not at all sufficient for getting
anyone to the shiny peak of Lojban speaking proficiency. The only
available serious educational material, LFB, misses one of the most
significant parts: teaching of lexics of the language. I mean,
intensive teaching of useful, everyday lexics that cover 95% of common
speech situations.

Besides, speaking practice (a critical requirement in mastering of
spoken Lojban) is now only a dream for beginners. Why? Because there
are no Lojban speakers. :) This restriction could have got eased by
supplementary multimedia materials -- if they had been. More than a
year ago I've written Parallel 2, a multimedia program for parallel
reading with a possibility of listening to recorded sounds of Lojban
language. While the community showed moderate interest in it (you can
take a look at the number of downloads and several versions for
different platforms made by other Lojbanists), I see now that the
method used in Parallel is not adequate for what is required. Parallel
modules were rather chaotic and didn't encourage users to *speak*
Lojban. I am very sure that speaking enhances listening and vice
versa.

Suggestion
----------
Mastering Lojban requires a lot of work. It requires making tons of
excersizes, most of which are rather hard. Let us gather ourselves and
create a thorough and powerful course providing these excersizes and
possibility to think and SPEAK Lojban!
Let us:
- Decide what lexics are most important
- Create examples of their usage
- Create excersizes
- Record samples of our speech
- Create a format and educational software for different platforms,
and finally
- Use what we will have created for achieving proficiency in
spoken Lojban!


From now on, I will devote my free time to fulfilling this goal. I
call upon every competent and creative Lojbanist to take part in the
project that I think everyone will consider important.

Please, let my voice not be of one crying in the wilderness - share
your opinions and suggestions. Let us start this project together!


Yanis Batura