Subject: [lojban] Re: Lojban in 12 weeks?

From: Robin Turner <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2002 02:02:31 +0300

Nick Nicholas wrote:

>The Lojban brochure includes the claim: "A working vocabulary including 
>the complete set of 1350 root words takes about 8.12 weeks of study at 
>1 hour per day."
>
>Robin.CA's apophthegmatic response on the Wiki errata page: "Bullshit".
>
>I'm inclined to agree, actually, and have gone on record as saying that 
>we short-change Lojban when we claim it is an easy language to learn 
>--- it clearly isn't, and even if you learn the gismu in 12 weeks, that 
>in itself doesn't mean all that much.
>
>But I'd like to solicit opinions on this. Should this guesstimate be 
>excised from the Level 0 document? What has people's experience of 
>Logflash-like programs been in the past few years?
>
This results will vary enormously from person to person, depending on 
their general vocabulary-learning potential and their predilictions for 
vocabulary-learning techniques. Personally, I'm pretty hopeless at 
vocabulary retention - I have an impressive Turkish vocabulary because I 
live in Turkey and am married to a Turk who doesn't speak much English, 
but I learnt about 2,000 words of Chinese at university and forgot 
almost all of them within a few months (for most sutdents, "final exam" 
is a powerful psycho-linguistic cue meaning "You can forget all of this 
now").

As for the brochure, I'd suggest dropping the "Lojban is easy to learn" 
bit. It _is_ easier to learn than any natlang which isn't close enough 
to your native language as to qualify as a dialect (e.g. Italian for 
Spanish speakers), but _no_ language is easy to learn, and a lot of 
conlangs are easier than Lojban, especially if their based on the 
general class of languages your native language falls into (e.g. 
Esperanto for Europeans). 

In the end, I think people successfully learn languages out of practical 
necessity (e.g. immigrants), idealistic commitment (e.g. Esperanto) or a 
weird personal obsession (e.g. Elvish).

robin.tr

-- 
"We do not imprison ourselves with laws, or impoverish ourselves with money" - Iain Banks

Robin Tunrer
IDMYO
Bilkent Universitesi
Ankara 06533
Turkey

www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin