"angell.jared@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
" <angell.jared@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Anyways, I guess my only remaining question is: How long does it take
>the average person to learn Lojban?
To what level of skill, and with what prior language background. The
very non-average Nick Nicholas, as a high school student, picked up
partially complete teaching materials, and was writing creditable
Lojban after a weekend.
I am one of the poorer students of language there is, but I was among
the first to be able to carry on a Lojban conversation without a
dictionary - not fluently, indeed I've never really been fluent and it
is now 20 years since my wife and I sustained that first sustained
Lojban conversation on our honeymoon in Oct 1987, with a combined
vocabulary of around 350 words between us (and not all the same words
- our conversations were mostly trying to explain the words that the
other had not yet learned without dropping back into English).
The limitation, as with most languages, is vocabulary. To speak
English at a college level, you need well over 10,000 words of active
vocabulary, and a much larger amount of passive vocabulary. That is
probably true for any language. Languages using fewer roots with lots
of prefixes and suffixes probably allow you to get by with fewer
roots, but you still need to be able to understand that many compounds
easily. (Lojban is heavily based on such roots and affixes.)
The bottom line is that if you are a serious student and can learn
vocabulary more easily than me, you should be able to write a
comprehensible paragraph within a month on a not-too sophisticated
topic, carry on a written conversation online within 2 months, having
some sort of wordlist handy for what you don't know. If you can
achieve fluency, it will likely take 6 months to a year, and will
largely depend on how much you actually practice writing or speaking
in the language. If you become fluent in written Lojban, then the
odds are you will be near-fluent in spoken Lojban when first you try
(apparently, intoxication helps, since the difficulty Lojbanists have
is partly in relaxing their standards of cogitating about what they
are saying enough to just get it out).
But if your standard of skill in the language is one that requires the
ability to translate literary text from other languages and capture a
high degree of nuance, that is probably the most difficult skill there
is.
>How many words are there?
There are some 1320 roots, but that includes metric prefixes and close
to a hundred culture-specific words that one would only use when
talking about something related to that culture in some specific way.
There are perhaps 500-600 "little words" that handle grammar, and
numbers and letters as well as the expression of emotions. Some of
these may be compounded, but the compounds are usually quite
predictable.
There are several thousand compounds made from those roots, but no one
knows more than a small fraction of them, and there is no exact count.
The language as actually used also has a lot of borrowings from
natural languages. These are highly marked, and only barely within
the Lojban language, but are heavily used in any advanced discussion
because no one has gotten around to learning compounds for the
concepts, if indeed they have been invented yet.
>I
>learned basic Hebrew in 2 years...but I was in Israel where it is
>spoken. I can't seem to find Lojbanistan on the map :)
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=jbotut&bl
and to whatever extent there is a Lojbanic culture, the wiki attempts
to do***ent it (one might say that the wiki IS the embodiment of
Lojban culture)
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Lojbanistani%20Culture&fullscreen=y
Most people who use Lojban, do so in text and not in speech. You can
thus visit Lojbanistan via IRC, in Second Life, in the wiki, and
numerous other ways.
There are a few Lojbanists who are also Hebraicists, who could perhaps
relate the process of learning Hebrew to learning Lojban in a way that
is specific to your experiences.
lojbab
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