Back to the original question, or rather the subsection on which language to learn. If you are short on time or patience, then go for toki pona. Although the claim that you can learn it in a day is a bit optimistic, you can produce reasonable sentences which say what you mean by the end of the day and pretty much read everything by the end of a week of writing to the various tp lists. The vocabulary is strange but, at only 125 words or so long, easily mastered. The grammar is very restricted and simple; the hardest thing will be expressing any complex ideas (and dealing with numbers, of which there are virtually none). There are a couple of unofficial lesson sets which are adequate for this language.
If you are a bit more ambitious, try Esperanto. You will probably be able to get the gist
of things in Esperanto right from the start, since much of the vocabulary is more or less familiar (the more so the more you know of Latin, Greek, some Romance Languages, German, and English) and the grammar is familiar from all the mentioned languages. The 16 Rules will get you through many of the details and learning the pronoun system takes care of much of the rest. But writing it is harder, since you don't know which of the available forms -- from all the languages listed -- are actually used for the meaning you have in mind. Sometimes your favorite is not used at all and sometimes it is used but in a slightly different meaning from what you want. But international and scientific words are all available immediately. For English speakers, remembering agreement, plurals in j rather than s, and the accusative case are the big problems. There are dozens of good primers in English (and every other major
language).
Lojban is more ambitious still, since there are no familiar vocabulary and even the "basic" vocabulary is 3000 words or so. The grammar of simple sentences is simple but feels unfamiliar, since many "objects" are things which would take prepositions in English. But once over that oddity, things run fairly smoothly for quite a while. In fact, almost none of the really complex pieces of Lojban are actually needed and those that are are easily analogized to familiar patterns in English. Unfortunately, there has not been until now a decent primer -- or even a really bad one, so the process of learning what you really need and what is window dressing or advanced work has to be by trial and error. Using the beginners list is a good idea in that people on it tend to be at a lower level and still learning rudiments -- for all they do try to fly too early. Folks on this list tend to be a bit better and also
terribly fond of esoterica -- not good role models, in short.
From: la gleki <gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Saturday, April 20, 2013 9:24 AM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Should I quit learning Lojban?
On Saturday, April 20, 2013 6:03:05 PM UTC+4, Betsemes wrote:
On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 9:38 AM, la gleki <gleki.is...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Mnemosyne is more robust and feature-rich while still looking clean. I
>> only complained about a single flaw, but now it's fixed and I'm ready
>> to import the whole of jbovlaste into it sorted by descending
>> frequency (that thread was a godsend).
>
> oh wait, i'll upload another freq dic now.
Thank you for the warning. I'd regret it if I had already imported it.
Could you tell us when your work on these lists is finished?
It is finished (see the last message that i sent 40 minutes ago in that thread). It is finished at least how i understand it. I checked all the words sorted by frequency till No 4043 and then added the rest of the words from jbovlaste. For me 4043 words are enough both for flashcards and MultiLing. Anyway word No 4043 had absolute frequency of only 11 so estimation error was likely to be high.
However, notice that it has cmavo clusters like {lonu} etc. I think those who learn lojban must be familiar with most frequent cmavo clusters as well even though their meaning can be directly derived from their components.
P.S. au do ca'o jmina lo frili je sampu be do jufra la tatoebas
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