On Mon, 22 Sep 2014, Luke Bergen wrote:
Do we have any native German (or other languages) speakers present? How easy/hard was learning Lojban for you.
Native Russian speaker here. But here's the thing:
I have not yet learned Lojban, I am just starting to seriously delve into it after years of hovering over it thinking how nice it would be to learn it.
ji'a Russian was my first/native language, but I've lived in America since I was 7.5 or so, so I am vastly more proficient in English (but my English proficiency has consistently been considered better than my peers since around 5th/6th grade and my Russian proficiency, I'm also told, is better than that of other natively-Russian kids with similar histories of development. I attribute this to my parents being good at nurturing/maintaining my mental development, but enough rambling). Point is, my perspective is not representative of a native Russian speaker. I think my perspective is more accurately seen as that of a natively-bilingual Russian-English speaker.
Since I am only starting learning lojban, so I cannot yet answer this portion of your question properly. First and foremost thought is that the early-bilingual experience makes understanding meanings/nuances easier, because meaning/thought and language is decoupled earlier and more intuitively/deeply in your mind when your language development is like that. But I'll do my best to remember to provide a follow-up once I actually feel I've learned lojban to a minimally usable extent, and then again once I feel I am truly fluent in it.
On Mon, 22 Sep 2014, Luke Bergen wrote:
Any thoughts or impressions on how non-english languages aid/hinder
learning lojban vis-a-vis it's lack of ambiguity?
Again, from the fluently-bilingual-since-childhood perspective, I think specifically that bilingualness makes learning any language easier (see prior paragraph), but lojban especially because lojban seems, from my naive understanding of it, to be better able to efficiently convey nuance and disambiguate/distinguish concepts, in large part "vis-a-vis it's lack of ambiguitiy". Because I learned a second language as a kid, I think that I am pretty good at figuring out meanings from context - being able to convey the distinctions that one language can make that another language cannot, however, is in my experience often problematic. I think (again somewhat naively) that lojban will prove for me to be a major boon in that department, but sadly I think that the biggest benefit it can have there is with someone else who knows lojban. E.g. I can think of several instances where I felt/thought wistfully: "if only I and this other person could both fluently speak lojban, then I could explain to them the meaning of this phrase from the other language much easier." (I think I have enough "meta" knowledge about lojban to confidently think it can do that even while not knowing enough of lojban to know how exactly it would.)
On Mon, 22 Sep 2014, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
E.g. I can see the need in explaining {co'i} earlier for Russian speakers than for English speakers so that the first ones find more familiar features sooner. The same for free word order which in some ways is more limited in English and thus not that relevant. May be a few more features but these two are most noticeable.
Maybe this is just because I am prone to thinking that more mental difficulty is better, or some other wierd aspect of my cognition, but I am inclined to think that for the most part, teaching people the familiar stuff first will just make them complacently willing to remain ignorant/deficient in the unfamiliar, and will have an adverse effect in the long term for people picking up the whole language.
Regards,
mi'e .aleksandr.kojevnikov. mu'o
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