[lojban] ma krinu lonu lo jbopre na tavla fo la.lojban. ne'i levi snustu | Why aren't we speaking in Lojban in here?

[Jonathan Jones <eyeonus@gmail.com>]

Firstly, I know that Lojban is not the first language of anyone in these groups. I know that very few of us have good grasp of the language. It is also apparent that all of us know English, seeing as how that's the language we are primarily using to communicate with each other here.

I know there *used* to be a mailing list specifically for speaking in Lojban. I have no idea whether it still exists or not. I do know that at least at one time I was subscribed to it, and during that time, possibly including up to the present, the was little to no activity on there.

There are the IRC rooms as well, which are also for Lojbanic discussions. Every time I am (infrequently) on IRC, I see either no active discussions, or I see active discussions about Lojban being held in English.

I very occasionally see discussions being held in Lojban in a group thread, but these threads almost always die out rather quickly, with my guess to the cause being the lack of interest in reading something that needs to be translated before it can be understood. I admit to having been guilty of this myself.

I very highly doubt anyone will disagree that the only way to effectively learn a language is to USE it. The more the better. In high school, over ten years ago, I took 2 years of Latin. I learned quite a bit, and at one point I was even able to write whole essays in it. However, I never used it outside of Latin class, and so today, I can remember that there are ten(?) forms of nouns, and that's about it.

I do not profess to be an expert in Lojban. I do believe I'm pretty good with the grammar, but my grasp of the actual vocabulary is very poor. This lack is specifically the reason I created the Smart.fm lessons, with help from assorted people, notably Oren and RLP.

My point is, we should be using this language as much as possible. We all do, after all, profess a desire to be proficient in it, do we not? To be able to speak in Lojban as well as we speak in our native tongues?

There are numerous tools to aid us in using the language, until we are that proficient. When I first joined this community, I used jboski everytime I encountered anything said in these groups in Lojban. I had to. I couldn't possibly have understood what was being said otherwise, without a horrendous amount of effort spent looking up *every* *single* *word*. Now there's this wonderful thing someone pointed out just a few days ago called GoldenDict. I tried it, it's really useful. Now when I encounter a word in Lojban I don't know, all I have to do is move my mouse over the word and press a button, and this window pops up telling me what it means. Since I can parse grammatical Lojban on my own, the only time I use jboski now is when I'm making sure that what I *write* is grammatical.

Now, obviously, I'm guilty of the very thing I'm ranting about right now with this message. My reasons for this are: I'm not currently proficient at Lojban, this is a very long rant, and I highly doubt anyone would bother reading this if it were in Lojban.

If you actually read this entire thing, you have my gratitude. If you wish to respond, I would be very, very happy if you did so in Lojban. And if, in future, you see something written in Lojban, here in these groups or elsewhere, do us both a favour, and make your response be in the same language.

-- 
mu'o mi'e .aionys.

.i.a'o.e'e ko klama le bende pe denpa bu

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