Re: serving the needs of Lojban learners

[Dylan Thurston <dpt@math.berkeley.edu>]

I found the resources mostly adequate when I first came across Lojban
last spring.  Things that could have been better:

My favorite method of learning was to take a text and try and read it in
detail, looking up gismu and cmavo as appropriate as well as going and
reading the appropriate sections of the reference grammar papers.  I
would have appreciated (and still would appreciate) a collection of
edited texts, graded as to difficulty, perhaps with explanatory
comments; something for people to do after the mini-lesson.

I would have enjoyed the broken phone game as well.  The texts being used
now look rather difficult for beginners, though.  Is there enough demand
for a special game of broken phone for beginners?

One thing we have to realize is that Lojban takes a significant amount of
time for people at all stages.  Right now, for instance, I have little
time to spend on Lojban; I've been learning the gismu using LogFlash and
that's about as much time as I can spare.  We are going to lose people
when they realize this, regardless.

As for the Lojban list itself, the lack of threaded mail readers
certainly hurts.  There are two I know of, but both run under emacs (the
latest versions of vm and GNUS will both thread mail).  And mail readers
are less consistent about preserving the References line (which lets
threading work effectively, especially when the subject changes) than news
readers.

Changing to news is problematic, though.  It dramatically increases the
costs (though not to us directly).  Would we want an 'alt' group or a
Big Seven group?  The latter might be hard, while the former probably
wouldn't get good distribution.  But it would get some more newcomers.

As for the various WWW/summary proposals: great, if someone has the time
to maintain it.  I believe there is already software around that will
thread messages to a web page automatically; that would be the easiest.

Finally, minor things can help, like people remembering to put TECH in
the header.

co'o mi'e .dilyn.