Re: functions

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

>As for the goal not generally being spoken fluency, well this may not be an
>immediate goal for such a widely-scattered community (I'll be happy if I
>ever manage to write a decent e-mail in Lojban) but surely it is one of the
>long-term goals (otherwise why would we have all those phonological
>rules?).

One can want to be able to converse in Lojban, without trying for accentless
fluency.  The detailed phonological tules serve in lieu of that native speaker
model that we don't have.

>I am not suggesting a Lojban phrasebook, but the type of simple
>conversational Lojban found in parts of the refgram and draft textbook is
>useful, I think.

We will obviously have that kind of text at least as much as we have now.
The question is whether it should be an emphasis or not, when most people
studying the language will not use more than a few conversational elements.
(I have to also admit that I am prejudiced by having studied both Spanish
and German by memorizing ALM dialogues. 30 years+ ago, and I still can say
in German "Will you come with me to the library?  and a couple of lines
after that, but cannot use that trivial knowledge productively because that
is ALL the German I know.  What I remember of Spanish is absolutely NONE of
the ALM stuff, but rather a bunch of words that I learned from context (and
how to count) in a 1st grade after-school "Spanish club".  Ever since then,
I have seen "dialogues" as a worhtless torture, except insofar as it provides
lnaguage use in context (albeit highly stilted context).  Conversational
usages allow for more use of idioms and certain vocabulary items than prose
does, but unless you have the number of students to enact the dialog, it is
a pain to make use of them pedagogically.
>Given, though, that most Lojban at the moment is written,
>a lot of the examples should be letters, e-mails, stories etc.
.iesai
Indeed, the reason why the textbook work was stopped was simply because I am
NOT a very creative person, and it is VERY hard work for me to even come uo
up with the volume of "original and interesting" Lojban text that the current
 draft textbook has.  Actually, most of THAT was written by Nora too, so it is
two peoples output of Lojban text.  I couldn't produce the volume of examples
I thought were needed then, and nowadays I think my goals weren't ambitious
enough by a factor of 10.

Unfortunately, most of the LOjban that gets written is translations using
"difficult" constructions it seems.  It is very difficult to write within a
constrained vocabulry and constrained grammar constructs.

>1.  As much Lojban and as little English as possible.

.ie on the Lojban
.iecu'i on the English, except that more Lojban requires less English %^)

I have been self-teaching Russian using much the same techniques that I
imagine most Lojban learners will have to use - with limited contact with
good speakers and users, and I know the value ofan immersive quantityt of
examples.

>2.  A chance to work out the rules before explaining them.

I'm not hot on this one.  I never managed to glean anything useful
from this without LARGE volumes of text.  I certainly learned no basic
Russian grammar rules from this - once I had the basics down, I may have
gleaned the cases of a couple verbs from context, but I don't think I
learned them any faster having learned them by observation.  Actually
the grammar lessons I leanred best were those  that I learned after
doing them wrong  for months based on my own grokking, and then having them
corrected by someone who knew better.  What I have learned without rules,
is by reading LOTS of Russian aloud, I have acquired a fairly naturalrhythm
of the language and hence can guess at stress correctly more often than not,
 despite the fact that Russian stress is more or less irregular and I have never
seen any rules for predicting it.  But this took LOTS of text,more than I would
expectto find in a textnbook.

>3.  A wide variety of exercises (cloze, multiple choice, dialogue
>completion etc.).

.iesai, if only for maintaining interest.  The problem of course is that
many exercises used in basic books for pedagogical purposes are teaching things
like grammatical paradigms.  Lojban has relatively little of the sort of thing
that gets taught bythese kind sof examples.  As a result, I found it especially
hard to concoct varied examples.  Most of what we need people to learn
in the first X lessons is LOTS of vocabulary, and my experience is that

by the time most people have even memorized 250 words, they have a command
of the grammar sufficient tosay almost anything IFF they have the vocabulry.

The only things difficult about the language are the "advanced topics" involving
 things like tu'a and ce'u that have no natlang correlate.  I have no idea how
to teach that stuff, and I can say from personal experience (as you have perhaps
witnessed in my arguments with And and Jorge), grokking the rules from the
examples that have appeared seems to lead only to misunderstanding.  (I

>4.  Plenty of functional stuff i.e. how to do X in Lojban.

We don't know how to do anything in Lojban until we try it, and then wehen
we do, it seems to turn into a complex mess with very unintuitive rules.
I am VERY wary of putting the kinds of discussions that we have regarding
translation problems in a beginning textbook.  And unfortunately,most f the
simple "how to do" functional stuff is either trivial and unrevealing, or
it opens up the most sophisticwated on logical problems.

>5.  Plenty of vocabulary.

Yep.  But at what rate.  Most 1st year college level textbooks aim at around
1200 words by the END of the first year.  Which means 300 words after the first
quarter.  We have some obvious word choices - avoid lujvo, for example - but
which 300 words are most useful to learn first.

>6.  An accompanying cassette with Lojban dialogues (optional).

We already have this, but the order of the material on the tape matches the
original draft textbook order, and Cowan reordered the material when he broke
the 6 draft lessons up into 22.

>7.  Lots of pictures!

We don't have money for graphics artists, and I am not pareticularly
skiled in searchingout the kindof public domain clip art that would be
useful in a textbook.  This is the least likely of your suggestions to be
implemented.

>8.  Versions in other languages than English.

This requires people to translate large volumes of text.  You also have to
choose the right language.  We can most easily find translators into
Esperanto, butI am unconvinced that there is a lot of audience for
Esp[eranto textbooks in Lojban.  Second easiest to find is Spanish
translators, but we haven't recrtuited many Spanish-native Lojbanists (Jorge
being the stellar exception). We seem to have atracted small communities in
Sweden and Italy, but thus far only among English speakers there of course.
There is latent interest in Russia, and their culture values language learning,
but translating a book into Russian will be very diffiult.

And the bottom line is that, excludingthe English-dominated net, we cannot
economically publish books for the non-US market unless we can getthat market
MUCH larger than it currently is.  We are at considerable risk with the
 refgramas to selling enough cpies to break even.  We'll have learned some
 lessons by
the time of the textbook publishing, but still, in the volume of sales we are
taling about, getting the price below $30-40 will not be easy.  And selling
a break-even number of books in another language at that price seems to be a
pipe dream at this point.

>If and when work on the textboook resumes, I would be very willing to
>contribute. OK, my Lojban is pretty minimal at the moment, but I do have a
>lot of expeience of writing language-learning materials.

The thing we need most, and it can start now, is lots of examplesa and text
using relatively limited vocabulary and only simple grammar.

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
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