| learning materials | cilre datni |
The slow part of learning a language is learning the vocabulary.
| Jay : Lojban : learning |
Some people prefer to learn vocabulary by looking it up as they need it; after several tries, most of it will stick. I prefer to learn by drill and practice. It’s tedious work, but it’s more thorough and far faster. I want to be free of the dictionary as soon as possible.
Both ways require discipline, only different kinds.
One problem is that flash card programs by their nature only teach an English keyword for each Lojban word, not the full definition and usage. Looking it up as you go is still the only way to learn the full definition.
I used the imaginatively-named Macintosh program FlashCards 1.8 to learn most of Lojban’s vocabulary. It was written by Richard Kennaway. This is now a very old program and you should expect trouble getting it to work on any modern computer.
First I memorized the gismu using the official files. I had to twiddle the files a tiny bit to get them working with FlashCards, but I don’t remember exactly what I did, so I’m putting my copy on this server. I worked hard at it and learned them in about six weeks. I guess most people should allow two to four months to work through this many words.
In learning the gismu, I used FlashCards’ Reject feature to reject all the cmavo. They slowed me down, and I wanted to concentrate on one thing at a time.
NOTE: In most Mac browsers, you can download these files by control-clicking on the links or by holding down the mouse button. Choose “Download” or “Save Link As...” from the pop-up menu.
The most important cmavo to learn are from selma’o UI and selma’o BAI. I’m providing a configuration file “ui.fcfg”; you’ll need to copy it to make an identical file “bai.fcfg” to get started. After I’d worked through these, I mooshed them together into one file “uibai” so I could practice them both together.
The cmavo are much more difficult to learn than the gismu. To simplify my life, I edited the many of the keywords to make them more regular and memorable—if I had trouble with a word solely because of its keyword, I changed the keyword if I could. It helped, but there are still many arbitrary details that you have to get right. fa’e and sefa’e mean the same thing, but they have different keywords; it’s irritating, but you just have to memorize them.
After UI and BAI, I learned the other cmavo in a mass. I deleted many of those having to do with letterals, because I don’t expect to ever have to talk about Hebrew characters, but I learned all the others, including the mathematical ones. Again, I edited many of the keywords.
In 2001 I memorized the rafsi, working at a much slower rate so that I had more time to read and write in Lojban. The next step, if I had ever finished that, would have been to cast around for a way to memorize place structures, because I was tired of constantly looking them up. After all that I would finally be free of the dictionary—except for fu’ivla and some of the less-comprehensible lujvo!