learning lojban

["F. Schulz" <cbmvax!uunet!PYRPS5.ENG.PYRAMID.COM!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!fschulz>]

I really like the diagrammed sentences document.
I was able to learn a lot about the grammar without
getting bogged down in details. This is my
favorite introductory writing on lojban.

I believe the document does not need to be changed much,
other than the correction of minor errors.
The introductory grammar rules should never
generate illegal sentences. Covering the full
is not necessary. I like learning grammars which generate
subsets of the language. The
 sumti ne sumti
pattern is good enough for this level of detail.
What I would really like to see, would be follow on documents
written in the same delightful style, going into more detail.

I have read 3 of the 6 draft lessons. The major thing I did
not like was mixing in the vocabulary sentences with the
explanatory text. I have a lot of trouble learning the gismu and
drill in the vocabulary by constantly rereading sample text.
Having sample lojban text isolated in a separate part of the
book would be very helpful.

The way I learn the gismu is by making lists and memorizing
the lists. This way I can do vocabulary drills while doing
other activities such as driving or walking. I suspect you
need to have a fairly good memory for logflash to work. I memorize
gismu 3 at a time, and then assemble clusters of 3 into lists.
This minimizes demands on memory during the initial learning.

I do not find the gismu to be much easier to learn than words
from unknown languages. I believe the linearity assumption
that JCB makes is totally useless. For example, take
"cidni" which has 100% recognition score for the English
component since all of "knee" is present. My personal recognition
scoring is 0%. This was the hardest word for me in the lesson 1
body parts. I spent a lot of extra time to learn this word.

The scoring is position dependent. The final two letters provide
almost no recognition value. Even worse is the "cisma" , "cmila"
pair, which I guarantee many English speaking lojban speakers
will swap. I tend to swap them even after intense drills.
This pair gets very high negative recognition scores for English.

Some words are easy. I see "tcati" as "ocha" from japanese. The
"ti" at the end is useless baggage. In spite of this criticism
of word recognition, I believe the word construction was done
well, giving good phoneme frequency counts.

        Frank Schulz ( fschulz@pyramid.com )