>>> Neither of these are interactive, but they are more or less the >>> standard way to learn the language. A project called ICSL (Intensive >>> Course in Spoken Lojban) was working on making a more interactive >>> course based on conversations in comic strip format, but it's been >>> stalled since December or so. >> >> It would be great to have a Pimsleur-style audio course. One >> of the existing courses could be simply translated into lojban >> and released as mp3 on the web. How hard could this be, I wonder... > >Pretty difficult. It's not just a matter of translating the material. >Each course is different and takes into account the grammatical >differences between the target and native languages, as well as the >differences in what sounds are used and how.
How important are these effects? And is there even an equivalent in lojban yet? >For example, if we were to prepare a Pimsleur style course in >Lojban we would have to introduce the Lojban concept of sentence >structure (as relations or brivla) in comparison to the English >structure (as nouns with verbs and modifiers). >What I'm saying is that it's not just a matter of teaching >vocabulary. That would be trivial. And not that useful. The >Pimsleur method also teaches how to put the words together -- I >wouldn't quite call it grammar because they don't ever say the >rules right out, you just sort of pick them up. Exactly. Why wouldn't this work in lojban? >I would love to see such a CD made, since the biggest hurdle to >learning Lojban at the moment (I opine) is the lack of good >learning and practice material for the beginner. Indeed. I imagine most people's eyes are glaze over by the third paragraph about gismu and sumti (I've known about lojban since 1999 and I still had to look those up). >As for the sound, I expect this is because there's not terribly much >fluent Lojban recorded out there. My go at recording Lojban is at my >website >http://www-personal.umich.edu/~alexjm/reader0.html Best I've heard to date. I have some "official" Loglan tapes around here somewhere. If I had a cassette player I'd dig them up. -Carl
