Nick Nicholas wrote:
The Lojban brochure includes the claim: "A working vocabulary including the complete set of 1350 root words takes about 8.12 weeks of study at 1 hour per day."This results will vary enormously from person to person, depending on their general vocabulary-learning potential and their predilictions for vocabulary-learning techniques. Personally, I'm pretty hopeless at vocabulary retention - I have an impressive Turkish vocabulary because I live in Turkey and am married to a Turk who doesn't speak much English, but I learnt about 2,000 words of Chinese at university and forgot almost all of them within a few months (for most sutdents, "final exam" is a powerful psycho-linguistic cue meaning "You can forget all of this now").Robin.CA's apophthegmatic response on the Wiki errata page: "Bullshit".I'm inclined to agree, actually, and have gone on record as saying that we short-change Lojban when we claim it is an easy language to learn --- it clearly isn't, and even if you learn the gismu in 12 weeks, that in itself doesn't mean all that much.But I'd like to solicit opinions on this. Should this guesstimate be excised from the Level 0 document? What has people's experience of Logflash-like programs been in the past few years?
As for the brochure, I'd suggest dropping the "Lojban is easy to learn" bit. It _is_ easier to learn than any natlang which isn't close enough to your native language as to qualify as a dialect (e.g. Italian for Spanish speakers), but _no_ language is easy to learn, and a lot of conlangs are easier than Lojban, especially if their based on the general class of languages your native language falls into (e.g. Esperanto for Europeans). In the end, I think people successfully learn languages out of practical necessity (e.g. immigrants), idealistic commitment (e.g. Esperanto) or a weird personal obsession (e.g. Elvish).
robin.tr -- "We do not imprison ourselves with laws, or impoverish ourselves with money" - Iain Banks Robin Tunrer IDMYO Bilkent Universitesi Ankara 06533 Turkey www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin