more detailed explanation of generation 1 and textbook plans

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!lojbab>]

I've been asked a couple of pointed questions about the textbook and
grammar status - why they haven't been done yet, and to what extent the
current plans fulfill our promises of long ago.

I will lead up to a specific set of questions, published in a separate
message for easier response, to give me a better sense of what aspects
of our teaching materials are most important to you.  The result will
largely determine the emphasis I will use on assembling and updating the
teaching materials for the first generation learning-materials-book/
textbook.  Many responses are sought, from people of all levels of
activity.  Lurkers, speak up!

Let me give an outline history for the discussion that follows.
Relative newcomers will be able to make more sense of the discussion
with this common basis.

Dec 87 was when the original gismu word-making was completed.  At that
point we had not even fully accepted that we would have to recreate the
grammar from scratch to avoid JCB's copyright claims.  That grammar work
started in earnest the following June.

Oct-Nov 88 we had the first complete 'Lojban grammar' done.  In Oct 88,
I also put out for review the first 30 pages of a detailed grammar
description explaining the whole grammar in depth from a 'big picture'
point-of-view.  Review comments from Dave Cortesi, among 8 others
indicated that while the explanation was good, it just wasn't tutorial
enough.  Dave suggested that we write a textbook first, then write a
'reference manual' later.

Jan 89 - we started the first Lojban class, intending to cover lessons
at one per week and finish the whole language by June.  I was attempting
to write lessons at that rate, and came close to succeeding at first.
But the pace was too ambitious for the class, and for me.  Still, the
300,000 words or so of the draft lessons that I completed by May stands
as my high point of productivity - one that I have suffered a lot of
stress trying to live up to ever sense.  The draft textbook outline,
some 18 pages, is still a reasonable summary of what a systematic study
of the entire grammar should include, even though the last 8 lessons
outlined consist mostly of miscellanies that disjointedly fill in gaps
in the first 10 lessons designed to achieve conversational ability.

Jun 89 - LogFest that year interrupted my textbook writing, and I never
really got back to it.  The class continued, but the students were
lagging in vocabulary.  Questions arose in that we couldn't answer
quickly, notably the 'negation' question, that led to 8 months of
thorough rethinking, which was followed by detailed rethinking of
virtually every other point in the grammar in successive examinations of
similar depth, ever since.  Put succinctly, while we could teach the
language we knew with little problem, it was difficult to answer
questions that used features of the language that we and others hadn't
used, and that no one had thought about much, either.  But as the
language community grew, the odds were that every new active Lojbanist
would stumble onto a new item that we hadn't thought about, and ask an
unanswerable question.

Nov 89 - after a month-long interruption for Worldcon, we declared the
first class 'over' after having achieved the original aim - sustained
conversation totally in-language for several hours by people who hadn't
participated in the design.  But the bodies left along the way showed
that the teaching philosophy had to be redesigned.  The 2nd class, in
Blacksburg VA, had started in April but folded after some 4 months after
completing lesson 3 - the draft lessons were OK for self-paced
self-study but insufficient for a group study trying to work together at
a single pace, led by someone who didn't know much more than the rest.
Another problem was the varying groups of students and their approaches
to learning, as discussed below.

Nora wrote the grammar outline, now the diagrammed examples discussed in
my just-posted response to Frank Schulz, intending it for people who had
finished the 6 draft lessons and needed a quick reference to 300 pages
of detail.  We ended up also giving it out as part of introductory
materials after being plagued by questions/complaints from people who
had hardly seen any examples of the Lojban grammar features in either
the brochure or the Overview of Lojban.  Alas - that outline without any
explanation never served the introductory function well, and the new
version I started circulating last fall is padded with some explanation
aimed at the introductory audience.

Jul 89-Jan 90 - Athelstan paved the way to a new approach at teaching
with his first minilessons, finally realized in print in the draft
circulated last fall.  In a 1 hour session, using a vocabulary limited
to some 40 words that referred to concepts that could be pointed out and
used in a typical lecture room, Athelstan covered most of the material
of the first 3 draft lessons.  He regularly got everyone in a group of
novices, able to say something in Lojban and know what and why they said
it within that 1 hour.  This was astoundingly successful with the
majority of those who saw these mini-lessons because it gave a good
sense of the 'big picture'.  It hasn't worked so well in print, because
what was successful as class exercises, where novices learn from each
other, fails in print, where it merely appears that there are a lot of
exercises with too little explanation.  We know how to fix this, but
Athelstan has been distracted by numerous personal crises for over a
year now and hasn't yet finished even the answer key (alas, for those
still waiting).

The major problem with the minilesson is the opposite of the one found
in the draft textbook.  Concentrating on minimal vocabulary, and getting
a couple of big ideas across in a hurry, the minilesson gives no sense
of the depth of the language design, with all of the flavor of its new
ways of looking at the world.  None of the cute entertaining, aspects of
the language are included (nor are they in the draft lessons).  The
problem is that these features, while interesting and mind-expanding,
tend to be rarely applied in real usage.  (As an example, I refer to the
classic use of 'enough' as a number by JCB, leading to what in Lojban is
"mi raumoi" - I am enoughth (in a line of attendees for a sold-out
movie).  So we don't teach them early - they are bells and whistles.
But they are also what makes the language worth studying for some.

A related problem is that, while a couple of basic concepts are learned
well using the minilesson, we've had very little sign that anything more
than those basic concepts have stuck, and the latter only minimally and
at the conceptual level.  Athelstan has several times tried to do a
second minilesson to follow on for people who have had the first one - a
mini lesson that might be taken the next day, or maybe several months
later at a different SF convention.  They've never worked except for
people who have just had the first lesson - too much was forgotten.  The
sense I (possibly different from Athelstan) have, is that the minilesson
effectively teaches the 'what' of the language, but not the 'why', and
that lack of 'why' means that people don't have the wherewithal to
continue on their own.  The draft lessons, by comparison, are heavy with
'why', but inefficient at getting you to a point of being able to
express yourself in the language, and even more important, with being
comfortable doing so.  This can only be done with LOTS more examples and
exercises.





The discussion of the diagrammed examples is a constant problem I've had
in writing teaching materials, from intro stuff to the textbook.  I've
been told by people who are skilled at teaching that at the beginning of
a teaching sequence, you must simplify, and if necessary oversimplify,
to avoid confusing the learner.  A senior Lojbanist who teaches martial
arts says that a good instructor will positively lie in the first
lessons, because the untrained person will not only not understand, but
because of the differing cultures, etc., will jump to wrong conclusions.
The draft mini-lesson, and the older draft textbook lessons, are
patterned after this idea of starting with slow, somewhat oversimplified
situations, and working up to complications later.  The ultimate of
this, of course, is JCB's Loglan 1, which teaches a bunch of
oversimplified pieces of the language but gives no idea how to put the
pieces together coherently.  I think the draft textbook did much better
than that, being that by lesson 6 it had worked up to a full-page
narrative.

Other people, especially those who do not intend to spend a lot of time
learning, but who want to get the big picture quickly, find the
diagrammed examples, and the EBNF to be just what the doctor ordered.
They find the elaborate explanations of the longer texts distracting.

Indeed, this is reflected in the two types of complaints most often
received about the draft lessons.

GROUP I - One group basically complains that after lesson 3, 4, 5, or
even 6, they don't have enough grasp of the features of the language to
say what they want to say in print OR in conversation, and hence are not
motivated to try (things like lujvo making, logical connectives, and
non-trivial tenses).  When I ask people in lesson 3 to make up a
sentence expressing a simple bridi, a common response was, "how do you
say this?" followed by something that is considered simple colloquial
English but which is not within the power of lesson 3 grammar (lack of
knowing syntax for relative clauses was the typical key to these
problems, for those who are interested - these features are covered in
lessons 5 and 6 - certainly of interest to you, Frank).

One of the first class students, Albion Zeglin, asked a question about
negation (interactions with quantifiers) about the time we finished
lesson 6 - one that we hadn't yet considered - it was so abstruse by the
standards of even lesson 6 that I hadn't worried about the answer, much
less teaching it.  The result 8 months later was the negation paper, now
an unofficial 'lesson 7' without exercises that we include with the
draft lesson set because it presumes a person knows the material of
those lessons.  The type of 'big picture' overview in that paper
represents what the Group I student usually wants.  The upcoming tense
and MEX papers by John Cowan, and a whole slew of other papers still on
the drawing board address this approach to the language, which is that I
originally intended back in 1988 - a thoroughly documented summary of
the grammar features explained in a moderately tutorial fashion.


GROUP II - The other group found the pace of the textbook to be too
fast, not in terms of number of pages spent, but simply the rapid pace
at which new ideas were presented.  When I completed a topic, I moved
onto the next, presuming that the previous topic was covered and
therefore understood.  But if a person was uncertain about a point in
lesson 2, then getting a bunch of new information in lesson 3 only
increased the confusion.  For all the examples and exercises that I had
put in the draft lessons, it turned out that there weren't nearly enough
for these people.

The comes a third situation, closely matched with the second situation.
I designed the draft lessons for a serious student who would be doing
most or all the exercises, studying the examples, and using LogFlash on
the side for rapid vocabulary growth.  The draft lessons assume roughly
100 new gismu words per lesson are being studied - assuming a LogFlash
student working daily with 20 words a lesson, this would mean a pace of
at least a lesson a week.  The goal was to get people as quickly as
possible up to a threshold of about 900 gismu (total vocabulary around
1200 words), which was then and is still seen as about the level at
which people are comfortably willing to try to converse.  But even the
best students in the first class didn't stick with the program, and only
one got through the 900 words - and then after EIGHT MONTHS, while those
of us who had designed Lojban had done the full 1300 words in 2 months,
then gone through them the critical second and third passes in another
month.

The rapid vocabulary pace adds to the whirlwind feel of the draft
lessons.  This feature coupled with the fast buildup of grammar
discussed for the second group, made the language especially hard for
those people.  The first group didn't appreciate the faster growth,
because they even more than the second group, were attempting to bypass
LogFlash and other systematic vocabulary building approaches and get to
the meat of the matter.


Now - Thus at the current state, we have a variety of projects in the
works to improve our teaching materials.  The minilesson will be
rewritten to provide that brief push for those who want to get started -
it will become part of our intro materials.  Among other things,
completing it will be a sign of good faith and commitment for the
limited number of people we can give support to without payment.  The
diagrammed examples will also help provide the big picture at the
introductory level.

The draft textbook will offer the other extreme, the slow detailed
approach that will get people understandingly to the point of trying to
express themselves in Lojban.  We now feel that the 6 lessons contain
some 75-80% of the grammar needed for beginning conversation expression
on most topics, and the remaining portions tend to be picked up rather
easily by simply studying what other people have written and trying to
write on your own.  Nick, Mark, John Cowan, and many others have proven
that this works.  Enough for expression is NOT enough for translation -
the stuff Nick and Mark are doing now come some 6-9 months after
finishing those draft lessons and continuing to work with the language
at a moderate level.  But Frank Schulz should feel much more comfortable
with the type of thing he is writing now for the list.  The generation 1
book will also contain the introduction and 1st lesson of the revised
textbook, a much more solidly written text that shows the lessons we've
learned from the minilesson, while maintaining the depth of a textbook,
and adding LOTS of examples and exercises.

John Cowan is working on what will effectively complete the Oct 88
grammar summary, but in a bit more tutorial style rather than straight
reference, a coverage and style similar to that in the negation paper.
Many known aspects of how Lojban semantics reflects its grammar will be
presented.  There are still holes (and always will be), but they will be
small.  His initial attempt at a reference, the dictionary-like "selma'o
catalogue" suffered from excessive need to cross-reference to other
sections; it tended to read better from front-to-back, rather than as a
reference where each item stands on its own, the way people use a
dictionary or encyclopedia.  There are about a dozen papers on his list,
of which he will write all but a couple.  Those which are done will be
included somewhere within the generation 1 books, but because they are a
cross between reference and tutorial, we have wavered between putting
them in a separate book, or combining them with one of the other books.
What happens will probably depend on how much he's gotten done at the
time the rest of the generation 1 stuff is ready, within a couple of
months.  The leaning now is to three books, with such semi-reference
materials kept separate from both student text and pure reference.
This allows us to include some of the better explanatory materials
from JL.

The last generation 1 book, a pure reference if John's stuff and
similar materials are published separately, is looking more and more
like what people want to see as a dictionary all the time.  It won't be
what >I< have in mind for a dictionary, and in many ways it won't be
what some people are looking for, but I think I'm going to be able to
include many lujvo without too much work, and perhaps twice as many
English entries as Lojban entries, possibly putting the word-coverage
almost comparable to that of JCB's 1975 dictionary.  The definitions
will be sparse, generally limited to the 100 characters of the LogFlash
gismu list, but that list is being tightly packed with information in
its new revision.  This will be the first book completed.  We expect
that people already working with the language can leap on ahead without
a lot of help if they have this book, and the textbook and other
materials can then piggyback on their added person-power.  It also forms
a basis of commitment to stability in our baselines that has thus far
been sufficient to motivate some to learn the language, but not all, but
isn't quite solid enough to give me confidence when textbook writing.
(Imagine what it would be like to repeatedly go through textbook drafts
trying to catch errors cause by place structure and cmavo changes of the
last year.  It is much easier to relearn the minor changes than to go
back and bring the past work up-to-date.  This nitty-gritty detail work
is what makes the job take so many months.  But when we don't do it, we
get sloppy errors like the one R. Miller and others caught in the
Diagrammed Examples dealing with the pronuciation of 'ai'.

lojbab