Re: [lojban] New to lojban, any suggestions?

[Arnt Richard Johansen <arntrich@stud.ntnu.no>]

> Can anyone share there stories of learning Lojban, how far they are
> at, and how they enjoy it?

I've written some of my story of learning Lojban at
<URL:http://people.fix.no/arj/lojban/why-i-like.html>.  Basically I've
studied Lojban on my own, on the basis of the electronic wordlists and
the draft reference grammar.

It is true that one can get a grasp of the basic grammar in a matter of
hours or days. But to be able to say what I wanted to say, I had to
acquire some more vocabulary. This I did primarily with Logflash, the
LLG's fine gismu drilling program.  I can't remember exactly how much
time I used to work through all of the 1342, but I think it took me
about six months, while at the same time reading the messages from the
mailing lists.  It wasn't until about a year after I first discovered
Lojban, that I felt confident enough to introduce myself (in Lojban, of
course!) to the mailing list.

Nowadays, Lojbanic IRC is sort of taking off, with one or two people on
most of the time. I fondly remember the evening last week when we had
more than five active participants online... :)

As Nick Nicholas mentioned, mastering Lojban can be intensely rewarding,
more so than most other languages.  I sincerely feel that Lojban grammar
has an entirely different "look and feel" than the other languages I
know or have a rudimentary understanding of -- which includes Esperanto.

> Does any one have any good suggestions for how best to study it?
> I've already gone through most of the basic grammar stuff, it's more
> an issue of learning vocabulary.

Use Logflash (or another computer program for drilling gismu).  Stay
away from software that drills cmavo, the descriptions in the dictionary
("making a tanru", "sentence ordinal", "end text scope", etc.) are
almost useless in teaching you what they mean and how they are used.
Instead, read a lot of Lojban text (on this mailing list, on the mailing
list jbosnu, and on the web), with wordlists and grammar/course nearby,
if necessary.

Visit us on IRC (channel #lojban on irc.openprojects.net), and talk
about anything you like.  Its web page is at
http://www.miranda.org/~jkominek/lojban/, its statistics should give you
an idea of what times are the best to stop by.  We are very friendly
(meaning that we will point out any and all errors that you make).

> What is the state of Lojbanistan?  How many people, and fluent
> speakers, are people happy speaking it?

To me, the biggest drawback with Lojban is the number of people who are
speaking it. It is actually true that I have never had a verbal
conversation in Lojban with anyone, ever. Most probably, I am the only
one in Norway who knows Lojban, and there are no one that I know of in
the rest of Scandinavia either. The Internet is, for the time being, the
only place I can meet fellow Lojbanists.

-- 
mu'o mi'e tsali