Re: [lojban] BPFK has approved cmavo swaps

> I am not confident in my ability to produce *correct* lojban, and so feel a bit of an imposter. Thus: I lurk.

I think a lot of learners feel like they would be imposing, but it is a massive catch-22: if they don't "impose" they won't get good enough that they'll no longer be "imposing". The same has happened to me, so I've tried to get more active :)

I would like the website to more explicitly encourage would-be lurkers to get active and participate, not fearing making mistakes. This is what I have meant with my ideas about a formalised mentoring process. It doesn't have to be mentoring per se, but just an explicit "talk to people! connect!" in the website somewhere. There really are so many people who very kindly love helping others learn Lojban.

Humans are social animals, so we can't sustain motivation to learn a language alone indefinitely. My experience has been that others love beginners joining the community and trying (regardless of any mistakes).

> I'm simply not up to that level of fluency yet on the creation side.

In martial arts, sometimes beginners use a sparring dummy before practising with real persons. Lojban, being a language suitable for human-computer interaction, could have a dumb chatbot for "sparring" practice before talking with real persons. I did a really basic mockup here to show the concept https://jsfiddle.net/gxextk82/10/ Once a user has exhausted its repertoire of phrases, the bot could recommended the user should connect with the community now that they feel a bit more confident.

Anyone, let me know if you want to collaborate on such a project.

> I've considered doing some software development to create a better workflow for, say, posting a blog in the language you're learning and easily allowing others to comment/correct specific parts

Such software exists already (e.g. Phabricator, or GitHub, or any normal code review software).

la suzanys and I are hoping to push for a Phabricator platform that will help facilitate this and other Lojbanic projects :) We might be able to all collaborate on a publication together.

From: lojban@googlegroups.com <lojban@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Joshua Proehl <joshua.proehl@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, 15 September 2016 1:33 PM
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] BPFK has approved cmavo swaps

most people seem to simply ignore everything that happens.

Many people only ever speak up when they have something to complain about (usually whenever something appears to be changing). Why do none of those people ever participate in anything constructive? Why has everyone been ignoring la uakci's many attempts at getting the community to participate in things like his interactive story or the weekly poems?

I read the mailing lists, and I enjoy the practice of reading content in Lojban. However I am not confident in my ability to produce *correct* lojban, and so feel a bit of an imposter. Thus: I lurk.

It's a problem I've had both in learning Lojban and German. Learning to produce (write/speak) the language is a completely different skillset than learning to understand it, and requires a lot of feedback and corrections. Neither of the mailing lists are the place for that sort of content, nor a particularly good medium. Were I to contribute content in lojban for poems/newsletters it would place a significant editing burden on somebody, as I'm simply not up to that level of fluency yet on the creation side.

(Solving this problem seems non-trivial. I've considered doing some software development to create a better workflow for, say, posting a blog in the language you're learning and easily allowing others to comment/correct specific parts, but in order to be valuable you need the community of fluent speakers to dedicate time to making corrections/comments reliably, and I'm not sure if Lojban has the critical mass to make it worth developing.)

I appreciate the content! It's wonderful! Were there a "upvote" button on email I would utilize it, but I agree with Timothy Lawrence that it's an email/mailing-list etiquette issue. More content to learn from is *always* appreciated though, for the record! :-)

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