textbook comments from Peter S.

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

Peter writes:
>The reason I feel so strongly about commenting is because the underlying
>material is so good... it should be conveyed in the most practical and
>clear way possible. That being said, the biggest problems I had with the
>texts were as follows.

Your comments are being taken in a positive spirit, but I'm afraid I'm
going to sound a bit defensive in responding.  I tried to explain a bit
of the history of the textbook effort last night, and never got to your
specifics.

But the point of the history lesson is that very much of what we do is
constrained by the volunteers, their knowledge of the language and their
available time, and a considerable INexperience in language teaching and
learning.  At the time I started Lojban, I had never learned much of any
other language in spite of several years study in K12 grades, and I
still am VERY poor at language learning.  In addition, the audience that
we have drawn has been mostly computer types and SF fans rather than
conlang aficionados, and most in the early days were monolingual English
speakers.  The first textbook draft was therefore "the blind teaching
the blind".  More importantly, we were obligated to write for this
audience of linguistically unsophisticated people.  One early student
specifically told me that they no longer remembered the difference
between the terminology nouns, verbs, and adjectives.  Clearly, writing
for an audience like that, I am NOT going to be able to write the kind
of textbook a 15-year conlang designer is going to want.


>1) There was too much emphasis on how English and Lojban differ, rather
>than on their similarities.  Focussing on their similarities would help a
>student bridge the gap between the two languages.  In the future, texts
>for students whose first language is not English could be adapted
>similarly, showing the similarities between their languages and Lojban.

There were two reasons for this.

1. The worst problem we have in teaching a linguistically unaware person
about Lojban is that it is NOT like English, even when it looks like it
is.  Take

mi ba   klama le  zarci
I  will go-to the store.

Someone sees this example, and immediately thinks that they can
translate any English sentence by word for word translation.

TOO MANY novice Lojbanists want to translate from English and their
first cut is to do a word for word translation.  IT DOESN'T WORK.  It is
essential to understand the concept of a predicate relating arguments,
and to internalize the process of figuring out what relationship among
what objects you are trying to convey.  It might slow down your first
Lojban sentence by a day or two to put that paradigm first, but if you
do not get it and understand it early on, you will probably not become a
good speaker/writer of the language without a difficult relearning
effort.

2. Many people are attracted to Lojban by the fact that it is very
different from English.  They want to know up front what those
differences are.  The ones indicated in the early chapters ARE
important.

>2) Over-elaboration of design features is also a problem.  In the initial
>chapters of a Lojban textbook, it would be better to explain just enough
>of several topics to make a student be able to speak and write, and leave
>the elaborations to later chapters.  Lojban is really wonderful, but we
>don't need to know *everything* about every topic, right away.

This is an artifact of when the draft tetbook was also a reference work.
I was also (and still am) very wary about explaining something as if it
is a complete picture when it is not, and had not learned how to tell a
partial story about Lojban that is "good enough" without being
misleading.  I'm still not sure if I can do so.

>For example, *all* of the simple sumti (pronouns, description, name, and
>perhaps the le nu ___ [kei] [ku] construction) should be introduced
>right away, and complex ones much later.

The "nu" abstraction is necessary early on but is not a "simple"
construction - it is a critical paradigm of the language, though.  It
was covered in chapter 3 of an 18 chapter first draft, though, so we
didn't put it off (the original lesson 1 had all the simple sumti except
descriptions, and lesson 2 had the descriptions).  It is also supposed
to part of the Lesson 1 overview in the rewritten draft, but I didn't
get that far (the file has incomplete section labels for the end of
Lesson 1 - I think it is 1.12 for abstractions - only a couple of
sections after where I got to.)

A major problem is that there are too many simple sumti words to learn
in one lesson.  Vocabulary learning is the critical path in any effort
to learn Lojban; you will master all of the grammar long before you have
mastered half the gismu list.  Meanwhile, if I give you 50 different
simple sumti in the first lesson, you won't learn any of them.  Better
to learn a few at a time, and give some contexts for using them
naturally.  This was specifically learned from the problems in teaching
the original Lesson 1.

If adults would be happy with very simple sentences in the first several
lessons, which is what natlang textbooks insist on, I could keep
explanations simple at first, or leave them out.  This will probably
happen to a considerable extent in the next textbook effort, based on my
Russian learning experiences.  But that is not what my audience wanted,
they wanted to translate poetry after 3 or 4 lessons, and that is what I
wrote for.  In trying to write for a self-teaching student, I felt
obligated to write in text any answer that I had to give verbally to the
students in class in response to their questions.  And they asked all
that detailed stuff - indeed the lenu construct and concept came out of
a question asked when I was teaching lesson 3, the current tense system
came out of lesson 4, and the negation system came out of my aborted
effort to teach lesson 7 of the original 18, all brought on by what
turned out to be theoretical questions affecting thedeepest levels of
the language.

I did not have the discipline to tell people "we'll get into that
later", and it was probably a good thing, given the degree of changes
that were wrought as a result.  Next time around, I will have to write a
textbook like people need when they are really studying a language, and
I will also need an overview chapter or book that gives people the "big
picture" to satisfy their questions about some of the details.

Writing for multiple audiences is VERY tricky.

>The first chapter (lesson01) spent far too much time "selling" the
>language.  The text should decide whether it is teaching or selling the
>language, and should do just one of those (hopefully the former!).

That is >2< chapters, not 1. Lesson 0 and Lesson 1. I think you passed
over lesson 1 thinking it was more of lesson 0. It is NOT, and
furthermore, I think it IS what you say the rest of the book is not,
though it is also incomplete.

What you say IS true for Lesson 0, which is by way of an introduction,
and IS a kind of "selling" - if I put this book on a bookstore shelf, I
have to presume they haven't read all our other material - I wasn't
writing for a net audience of people already sold on the language.
Indeed I was writing for a variety of people and the introduction was
intended to place things in a framework that would allow me in the text
itself to address the differing learning needs of people with different
backgrounds and goals.

I very much have to presume that most Lojban students have not
successfully learned any other language besides English (what most
people learn in school language classes has little to do with "learning
a language" as is evidenced by how few can do anything with the skill
after they finish their education).

If you did read lesson 1, it doesn't "sell" much of anything - it does
try to impress on the student that there are significant differences in
the Lojban paradigm from our English instincts.  My worst fear is that
it is throwing new concepts at you right and left - important concepts
if you want to write decent sentences - but not simple to understand.

>3) The concept of place-structure isn't discussed until lesson 5!!!  This
>should be introduced MUCH earlier!  It's fundamental.

You missed it much earlier.

The CONCEPT is introduced in the first section of lesson 1, but I don't
use the words "place structure".  That is introduced in Section 1.5,
along with explications of place structures that I think parallels what
you did.  I haven't done a detailed comparsion.

>The text says "Many new Lojbanists are confused by place structures."  I
>think this is because they had to wait so long before anyone explained
>it; frustrated, they've been puzzling over the gismu list, forming
>incorrect ideas.

In addition, the revision was written as a standalone document and does
not presume that someone has a gismu list as a separate document.

The first version presumed specifically that a person had read the
overview of Lojban, which is part of our level 0 package.  That
introduced a lot of terminology, concisely, that we tend to blow over in
all of our other stuff, including the (original draft of the) textbook.
It explains the x1/x2/x3 convention, and it uses just the sort of
expanded definition that you suggested for "sakci".  The original
lessons also had self-contained vocabulary units, which were lost when
Cowan did the rewrite, because they were dominated by obsolete place
structures.

The gismu list was not written to be a dictionary, though it has ended
up becoming one by default.  It was and still is an input file for a
flashcard program.  No one has the time to rewrite the gismu list in the
desired "place structure" form you suggested.  You are welcome to
volunteer, but it will take you weeks if not months %^), and we have
several thousand lujvo you can tackle after that.

>4) The tone of the material swings from over-explained to cryptic.  There
>is a long section in lesson 5 that belabors the point that English has
>"sentence subjects" and Lojban has "sentence topics."  This idea doesn't
>merit the amount of text, and seems to assume that the reader is quite
>dull.  On the other hand, look at the following, keeping in mind that the
>words and concepts "doi" "selma'o" "COI" "ju'i" "compound cmavo (such as
>ju'idoi)" and "vocative reference" have not been defined yet in the text.
>Wouldn't you find this a little bit cryptic?

This is another artifact of the multiple revisions.  That distinction in
lesson 5 is better explained in the beginning of lesson 1, of course.
The other words were defined in the original lesson 1, and are now
spread around however Cowan divided that original material.  And the
linguistic terminology again was covered in the overview that I presumed
that everyone had read.

>>e. cmene may optionally be preceded by the cmavo "doi" (English "O,
>>   ..." indicating direct address or vocative reference; i.e., when
>>   talking to that which is named.  They may also be preceded by words
>>   in selma'o COI, which also supports direct address.  However, cmene
>>   preceded by selma'o COI require a pause or doi between them to
>>   ensure resolvability under all conditions.  In informal direct
>>   address outside of sentence constructs, cmene also may appear
>>   without any preceding cmavo (e.g. calling out "doi djan." or just
>>   "djan."). Thus "ju'idoi djan.", or "ju'i. djan." are acceptable
>>   ways to get John's attention (ju'i is in selma'o COI).
>
>I know I did.

More dense than cryptic.  It needs to be expanded with lots of examples
of selma'o COI and explanations of each example, and a few exercises.
etc.  It was much larger in the original draft textbook, if I recall.

>...

Barring minor style differences, your rewrite doesn't look all that much
different than lesson 1 though it covers a few things I didn't get to
and skips some topics that are important.

Chris responded to Peter:
>- It still had a problem I noticed when I was reading the textbook:
>when you get talking about sumti, selbri, and bridi the first time,
>they're all used intermingled in sentences right off the bat, and it
>gets a bit bewildering, since it took me a while to remember which one
>meant what.  It's good to get students learning the terminology right
>off, so maybe a printed version of the textbook ought to have a sidebar
>with those definitions on the first few pages where they're used, so
>they can refer back to it as they try to plow through the paragraph the
>first few times.

Lesson 1 (revised) introduces these words 1 at a time, and has each in a
sidebar (actually a large block footnote that highlights the word and
its definition).  This is not easily evident in the electronic form of
the text, of course.  Remember that a lot is lost in the removed
formatting.

lojbab
----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                        703-385-0273
 For the artificial language Loglan/Lojban, see ftp.cs.yale.edu  /pub/lojban
    or see Lojban WWW Server: href="http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/";