Re: [lojban] You're Doing it Wrong

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

Lojban is a living language.  Many of us consider ourselves quite
conservative about it, but it's still young and changing fairly
quickly.  There's more changing than in your average natlang, and the
things that are changing are more fundamental, since we're still
hammering out some of the core grammar and inventing basic vocabulary.
 Every language changes, though.  Consider: The changes over English
in the same recent decades, such as the introduction of the words
"w00t" and "omg" and "tl;dr", haven't been integrated into most of the
learning materials for English (dictionaries, textbooks, etc) even
though English has literally more than a million times more speakers
than us and leagues of professional educators.

Everyone in Lojbanistan makes their own choices about how to improve
the condition of our teaching materials.  There are a lot of rough and
unfinished projects out there that people tried to put together.  I
don't think that's a failing, it's just a sign that we're open about
what we're working on and that we're trying to be helpful, but also
that none of us are professional language educators or textbook
writers or getting paid to do this.  The bright side is that if you're
willing to overlook the mess it's all in, there's more than enough
material out there to teach you Lojban.  If you explore all the
half-finished projects and sprawling wiki conversations and archived
arguments and so forth you'll eventually know as much about Lojban as
we do.  That's what it is to know Lojban at this point in history, is
to know all the same arguments we keep having and the same confusing
explanations we keep giving, to know the inside jokes we share and the
buggy programs we rely on.  There's no perfect polished Lojban we're
keeping secret from you around the corner, it really is just this
crazy beast you see, though it does work fairly well in practice.

What I'm personally working on, as far as basic teaching materials, is
video lessons.  Up until now there have been no audio or video lessons
at all.  What I'm doing is just to talk into a camera sometimes and
explain some basic things about Lojban.  It's not very organized, I
just have a vague sense of what I've talked about so far (not much)
and what's left to cover (lots of stuff).  At this very moment I'm
uploading a video that's nearly 14 minutes of me walking around in the
woods trying my best to explain the basic idea of sumti and how to use
them in a bridi.  I haven't covered lo/le yet, but since you asked
I'll try to do my best today to explain that (I'm going to do it from
the perspective of teaching the controversy/history).  If you have any
other requests for what I should talk about, I'd be happy to oblige.
I'm planning soon to make some playlists to separate out lessons in
English vs simple demonstrative Lojban vs me blabbing about stuff in
Lojban vs my little songs, but so far it's all just in a jumble sorry:
http://youtube.com/selckiku

Thanks for your interest in Lojban.  If you can tolerate our quirks,
we'd be very pleased to have you as a Lojbanist, as a conversation
partner, and as a friend.

mi'e la stela selckiku mu'o

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