[lojban] Re: lojban's difficulty

[John E Clifford <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

The main problem with oearning Lojban is the
almost complete lack of teaching material.  We
have some devices for pounding in vocabulary --
which some people have found helpful but as many
have found totally useless (and which are
misleading in the form given).  Given some
reasonably decent teaching devices (or better, of
course, some teachers)Lojban is no worse than any
0other language.  The sort of classifications to
which xah lee points are just Lojban's version of
what in other languages comes up as gender or
some similar thing (but, by the way, you don't
need {loi}; {jisra} is "a quantity of juice" with
the quantity uspecified so {lo jisra} is just
some quantity of juice, just what is wanted.  To
be sure, juice is one of those things where it is
hard to tell individual quantities  from
collectives of quantities, so {loi} also works.)

I would like to think that becoming proficient in
Lojban meant developing some sense of logic or
semantics (or pragmatics, why not) but the
discussion in these groups shows rather clearly
some times that it does not.  Nor, alas, do
people who are pretty good in those areas
necessarily have an easier time learning Lojban.
Like every language, it has its quirks even if it
is more regular than most and more inclusive of
odd categories like tense or collectivity (but
not, note, of massness).  The more languages you
know, the easier Lojban should be (unless they
are all in one family, where the family traits
get burned in as how things work)  (Good teaching
material probably come down hard on places where
Lojban differed from -- or conflicted with -- the
native language: English material would be a bit
different from French, a lot different from
Chinese and a whole Hell of a lot different from
Hopi, and, of course, Loglan material would be
very simple indeed.)
Lojban is also short on hooks -- we don't come to
Lojban knowing some Lojban words and phrases the
way we do for most European languages and most
other mahjor languages as well.  The claim that
the way the gismu are constructed makes them more
learnable is at least open to question if not
demonstrably untrue and there is very little else
to grab onto (attitudinals and the like work a
bit and {na} and {mi} and maybe {do}}.  But that
is an early obstacle that may be minor compared
to some of the later obstacles in other
languages, where Lojban moves smoothly (once we
figure out what is needed -- the unsettled state:
not just that things change but that we don't
really know how to do a lot of things -- is still
a problem after 50 years, though getting smaller
even as we speak.)



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