Re: [lojban] Teaching methods, especially WRT terminators, and validation thereof

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

Another two cents.  As someone who came to Lojban from Loglan, I am 
prepredisposed to use 'cu' always and everywhere possible.  One result of this 
(or a concurrent event, at least) is that, despite my logician's sense of the 
necessity of right brackets, I have never been very good at getting them in or 
in the right places.  Any teaching that heads off that problem has got to be an 
advantage, whether it starts with terminators and introduces 'cu' as a shortcut, 
or starts with 'cu' and gradually unfolds its underlying content.  In either 
case, students have to learn 'cu' just to read the archives, if nothing else; 
but also for economy (dealing with the pile RHEs that get required with 
arguments after the verb can be a real nightmare if you meet a 
not-well-thought-out passage).  My casual following of discussions of texts 
leads me to think that misbracketting (mainly forgetting an RHE) is among at 
least the top five problems (I think rather higher than lower),  

And to close with my usual screed: xorlo is the worst thing that happened to 
Lojban, almost enough to launch Logjam 3.

From: Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thu, September 9, 2010 8:36:03 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Teaching methods, especially WRT terminators, and 
validation thereof

On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 10:11 PM, Robin Lee Powell
<rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
>
> What you've got, as far as I can tell, is an interesting pedagogical
> technique that produces good early results, but is totally untested
> as to its results when students try to reach real expertise.

And even if the pedagogical technique does prove to be better (which I
am not doubting: In fact that's how I learned terminators too, that's
how terminators were taught in the original "diagrammed summary"
lesson, and that's how they are taught in CLL, despite Lindar's
mistaken beliefs about it. It is only LfB that deviated from that
method, and maybe people who learned exclusively from LfB ended up
confused about terminators, but most people don't limit themselves to
one single learning strategy) so even if that's the best way to teach,
which it probably is, it does not follow that one should for ever
avoid using "cu". It is simply not possible to learn Lojban and not
know how to use "cu" correctly. "cu" (which is not really a
terminator) is demonstrably more efficient than any terminator when
the choice is between "cu" and a terminator. You learn about "ku" in
your first lesson, and about "cu" in your second, or fifth, or
whatever lesson, but you do have to learn about "cu" before you can
read practically any text in Lojban. I don't think people will start
using "ku" instead of "cu" just because they learned "ku" before "cu".
It just doesn't make sense.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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